How Should I Call You? Rendering of Semantically Meaningful Anthroponyms in Subtitled Children’s Cartoons

Abstract

The rendering of anthroponyms in children’s cartoons, although being a rather challenging task for translators, is a virtually uninvestigated field in Lithuania and worldwide. The present study focuses on subtitling of semantically meaningful anthroponyms in 11 children’s cartoons from English into Lithuanian. The aims of the study are: to identify the most commonly used translation strategy for the rendering of semantically meaningful anthroponyms which were found in the corpus; to find out whether the Lithuanian renderings of semantically meaningful anthroponyms were more foreignized or domesticated; to identify and discuss problematic issues that subtitlers of the cartoons faced while dealing with semantically meaningful anthroponyms which were found in the corpus. The main objectives of the study are to classify the findings of the study according to a foreignization – domestication continuum and to analyze critically all the challenging situations which were dealt with by subtitlers in terms of anthroponym translation.

The anthroponyms which are found in the corpus are subdivided into two groups: charactonyms and semantically meaningful anthroponyms with no character defining qualities. The results of the study reveal that the vast majority of the anthroponyms found in the corpus have character defining qualities. The majority of such names are domesticated in the Lithuanian subtitles. In opposition to charactonyms, the majority of anthroponyms with no characterizing qualities are foreignized.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.24.6722