Home | Culture And Society | Language
It is often claimed that Russian texts are made from English texts in such a way that the proper names in most cases are not translated but transliterated. It may even be observed in reality. Still, there are some proper names where this rule of thumb does not work. An example are word combinations thatare partially made of a proper name and the other part of it are common words. Here we mean eponymic word set. Before we go into this issue of eponymics any further, let us analyze a bit and find the meaning of the lexical unit called eponym and its derivatives in linguistics. The array of vocabulary items in both English and Russian is subdivided into two big categories: appellatives and proper names. If you understand ancient Greek, you could know that the lexical unit “eponym” means “naming” or “giving the name”. For our ancestors eponyms originally meant people,deities or heroes, whose names were used to give names to cities, tribes and different objects, as well as governmental positions (e.g. archonts, consuls). At the same time the historic notion of "eponym" expanded, though it was used to refer not only to the a name of somebody, but it extended itself to refer to animals or an objects. These days the linguistic term "eponym" is more frequently used with reference to common phrases which have been chosen in a language on the principle of displacing one word from the category of proper names to the class of common words with an immediate allocation of non-literal lexical meaning. Hence, we work with three notions of an eponym: 1. being or object 2. proper name 3. regular word. When an interpreter deals with an English text, they should assume the background knowledge of the English text intended audience and the level of awareness of the Russian audience. The meaning of eponymism is built on stereotypical associations concerning a concrete, particular eponym and having the nature of encyclopedic connotation. Differences between these connotations in the English and Russian languages lead to different possibilities of appellativization of proper names. Cultural competence of a speaker defines the degree of transparency of an eponym. In that case the question arises: is it okay for a Russian interpreter to consider such issues? A number of eponyms share a common cultural background which makes translators job easy, for example “superman” or “Lolita”. The same thing can be said about the eponymisms that have lost their transparency in both English and Russian. (e.g.: Adonis named after a beautiful youth loved by both Aphrodite and Persephone and murdered by a boar, or the game of badminton that got its name from Badminton in the South West of England, Duke Beaufort’s country seat, where people started playing it). There is a problem onlyin case if an eponym is transparent in English, but means very little to the Russian audience. As you may observe, not all eponyms make interpereters stress their brains. The eponyms which are non-transparent, do not lead to any difficulties in Russian translation at all.
Article Source: http://blisspublisher.com
TransNeed provides professional translation services into Russian. The main policy of our agency is perfect and uncompromising quality which guides us in selection of the top professionals in any field and maintaining our work processes. You can use our free translation online.
Please Rate this Article
5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5
Not yet Rated
