The purpose of the present essay is to study the difficulties of translating, into French, Swedish proper names with a connection to the socio-political organisation of the country, i.e. names of Swedish national institutions and governemental bodies, unions and political parties as well as national and local non-profit organisations, and to discuss, in context, the validity of the various possible translation methods. The source texts used as primary material are excerpts from the book Porr, horor och feminister by Swedish author Petra Östergren (2006) in which she intends to offer a historical and at the same time critical insight into the debate about pornography and prostitution in Sweden. Drawing on both the skopos theory of Vermeer and Reiss and the theories about the translation of cultural elements developed by Swedish scholar Brynja Svane, the author of this essay will, as a first step, analyse the text type, skopos and target audience of both the source texts and the target texts, and, as a second step, sort out all instances of the chosen proper nouns according to the translation method used to render them. The motivations behind each translation choice, above all in accordance with the skopos of the texts but also with the stylistic requirements of the target language, will then be discussed and evaluated in details.

This study examines the strategies used in the translation from French to Swedish of an academic text written in the Central African Republic. It focuses on the two opposing translation strategies of domestication and foreignization as described by Venuti (2017) and investigates whether Venuti’s theory about foreignization as a way of resisting racism and imperialism is applicable to translations beyond the literary field. The source text of the translation is written in a former colony, in the language of the ex-colonizer, which makes it particularly interesting in terms of cultural features and brings to the fore the need of taking aspects related to racist and imperialistic ideas into account. Based on an analysis of the translation situation, several features of the translated text are being examined with regards to translational choices connected to domestication and foreignization. The results show that even though both approaches are employed, domestication is clearly the dominating strategy, and this preference for domestication is often based on an effort to promote the content and the academic value of the source text. In other words: contrary to Venuti’s ideas, domestication rather than foreignization is used as a way of resisting racism and imperialism in this particular case. Because of the narrowness of the text material investigated, no general conclusions can be drawn from this study. Some suggestions are however made at the end about broadening the general translational research framework and blur the line between literal and non-literal translation, as proposed by Vandaele (2015), and about broadening and deepening the research on the translation of non-literary hybrid texts.