The Strategies for Translating Proper Names in Children’s Literature

Abstract

The translation of proper names is one of the most challenging activities every translator faces. While working on children’s literature, the translation is especially complicated since proper names usually have various allusions indicating sex, age, geographical belonging, history, specific meaning, playfulness of language and cultural connotations. The goal of this article is to draw attention to strategic choices for the translation of proper names in children’s literature. First, the article presents the theoretical considerations that deal with different aspects of proper names in literary works and the issue of their translation. Second, the translation strategies provided by the translation theorist Eirlys E. Davies used for this research are explained. In addition, the principles of adaptation of proper names provided the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language are presented. Then, the discussion proceeds to the quantitative analysis of the translated proper names with an emphasis on providing and explaining numerous examples. The research has been carried out on four popular fantasy books translated from English and German by three Lithuanian translators. After analyzing the strategies of preservation, localization, transformation and creation, the strategy of localization has proved to be the most frequent one in all translations.