Das erste Mal gesehen und zugehört habe ich Wilhelm F.H. Nicolaisen am 13. August 1984. Es war der Eröffnungstag des XV. Internationalen Kongresses für Namenforschung in Leipzig mit dem Generalthema „Der Name in Sprache und Gesellschaft“. Sehr beeindruckt war ich damals davon, was er alles über Leipziger Namenforschung sagte. In den „Namenkundlichen Informationen“ erscheint sein Name erstmals 1974. Rosemarie Gläser rezensierte sein Buch „The Names of Towns and Cities in Britain” (Gläser 1974). Später rezensiert er auch für unsere Zeitschrift, so zum Beispiel ausführlich die Studie von Ines Sobanski: „Die Eigennamen in den Detektivgeschichten Gilbert Keith Chestertons. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Praxis der literarischen Onomastik“ (Nicolaisen 2000). Vier Aufsätze hat Wilhelm F.H. Nicolaisen in unserer Zeitschrift veröffentlicht: „Über Namen in der Literatur“ (Nicolaisen 1980a), „Zur Namenforschung in den USA“ (Nicolaisen 1980b), „Die Welt der Namen“ (Nicolaisen 1998) und „Ortsnamen als Zeugnisse der Siedlungsgeschichte Nord-Ost-Schottlands“ (Nicolaisen 2002). Wilhelm F.H. Nicolaisen war einer der allerersten, der Mitglied der 1991 gegründeten Gesellschaft für Namenforschung wurde und sich immer für sie interessiert und engagiert hat. Der Arbeitsstelle an der Universität Leipzig schenkte er alle seine Veröffentlichungen. Wir haben viele Gründe, Bill Nicolaisen in dankbarer Erinnerung zu behalten!

Die Nachricht vom Tod des niederländischen Namenforschers Rob Rentenaar trifft den Kreis der Namenforscher völlig unerwartet. Gewiss werden alle, die Rob Rentenaar kannten, erwartet haben, ihn spätestestens auf dem nächsten ICOS-Kongress in gewohnter Munterkeit wiederzusehen. So ist die Betroffenheit sehr groß. Rob Rentenaar war praktisch sein gesamtes Berufsleben lang mit dem P.J. Meertens-Instituut van de Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen in Amsterdam verbunden, in das er 1961 als studentischer Assistent eintritt, zunächst mit volkskundlichen Arbeiten betraut. Doch schnell wird er in die Abteilung „Namenkunde und Siedlungsgeschichte“ übernommen, der er 39 Jahre lang treu bleibt und aus der heraus er durch sein Wirken und seine Publikationen seinen Ruf als gewissenhafter und anregender Namenforscher im In- und Ausland begründet und festigt. Internationale Anerkennung erfährt Rob Rentenaar durch seine toponymische Dissertation über „Nachbenennungsnamen“ (Robert Rentenaar: Vernoemingsnamen. En onderzoek na de rol van de vernoeming in de nederlandse toponymie, 1. Aufl. Amsterdam 1984; 2. Aufl. Amsterdam 1985) und durch seine Arbeiten über die Namen an Küsten (Die litorale Toponymie Nordwesteuropas, in: Niederdeutsches Jahrbuch 114, 1991, 89-107).

The present paper deals with a number of aspects, that are connected with the complex topic “names and translation”. Thereby the focus does not lie on the general question of translatability of names, but shows several cases in which names are translated: Geographical names, personal names, names of products and finally names in literature.

Three and a half centuries Don Quixote in German: the proper names. – The first German partial translation of Cervantes’ novel El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (Part I 1605, Part II 1615) dates from 1648, the most recent one from 2008. As proper names play an important part in Don Quixote, this paper analyzes their rendering in four different translations, namely by Joachim Caesar (1648), Ludwig Tieck (1799-1801), Ludwig Braunfels (1883), and Susanne Lange (2008). Proper names are rooted deeply in the respective cultures of their users. Therefore the translator’s task is a difficult one: Shall he try to translate the names and thus activate for his readers as many as possible of the cultural connotations they possessed in the original language or shall he transmit them unchanged and thus contribute to the strengthening of local colour? It is shown that different times preferred different solutions, earlier times trying to translate the names of the novel. But even the most recent translation of Don Quixote does not, as might be supposed, abstain from translating part of the novel’s proper names.

Gradiva – the translated name and its visual representation. – The name Gradiva appears first in a short novel which the German author Wilhelm Jensen published in 1903. It became famous because Sigmund Freud analyzed Jensen’s novella in his study Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ (1907). In this story the young archaeologist Norbert Hanold is obsessed by a classical relief representing a young woman walking in a special, elegant way. Therefore he calls her Gradiva (she who advances). The young woman appears to him in dreams when Vesuvius is about to erupt in Pompeii, and he feels he has to visit this ancient Italian site. Here the same phantasmagorical figure appears to him. At first he believes her to be the incarnation of the ancient Gradiva, but later he realizes that she is not the reincarnation of a Pompeiian maiden, but his living childhood girlfriend. – The aim of this paper is to show that it is not a physical likeness between the archeologist’s girlfriend and the ancient relief which lies at the root of Hanold’s delusion, as Freud asserts, or a fetichist obsession, as his followers claim, but the surname of his girlfriend: Gradiva is a translation of her repressed surname Bertgang, and the ancient relief is the visual representation of this name. – The final paragraph of this paper shows the significance which Gradiva attained for the Surrealist movement, whose members declared her to be their “muse”.

The Children’s and Household Tales by Brothers Grimm are world famous thanks to their translations in many languages. In the presented article its author refers to her own translation of the Grimms’ folktale collection (published in 2010) and discusses translation decisions referring to selected personal names. The functional typology of literary names by H. Birus (1987) builds a starting point for detailed translation analyses in three categories: speaking, classifying and embodying names. It is surprising that in a translation which was intended by its author to be philologically faithful the majority of anthroponyms was not transcribed (in order to render their foreign character) but became domesticated by means of adaptation, substitution and literal translation. It proves that in a literary piece of work proper names fulfill complex functions which makes the translator choose different translation methods to render them.

The question of translatability and translation of „meaningful names“ in Witkacy’s Plays. In the plays of the Polish dramatist, writer and artist Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz („Witkacy“) the characters normally bear „meaningful names“. These can but need not necessarily serve the characterization of the respective figure. They are often just a mere play on words, achieved through usually applying the techniques of shifting and compaction. Translating the names requires to transfer this play on words into the target language in a way, that as few aspects of the original as possible, get lost, though this cannot always be achieved completely. The essay examines in a vast number of examples, how the creation of the names was done in the Polish original, and if and how Makarczyk & Schuster succeeded in translating the plays. (Translated by Karl-Heinz Förster)

The submitted article deals with following question: which translation procedures are used in translation of literary names and in what scope. We offer the answer based on the analysis of 4632 names from slovak translations of german literary works. In the analysed corpus we detected 9 procedures which we describe in closer detail. Subsequently we make provision also for the time aspect of origination of translation and statistically verify thesis that comtemporary translations are characterized by exotisation, whereas the translations from sixties and seventies of the twentieth century naturalized in a greater extent. In the article we interconnect the knowledge from literary onomastic and translatology, we describe in a closer detail individual phases of translation process, as well as the analysis of proper names.

This study combines two aspects of particular interest in the field of translation: the study of proper names, which, having a particular idiosyncrasy, make for especially interesting analysis in an interlinguistic context, and audiovisual translation, which, on account of the inherent restrictions governing a text of this nature, has particular characteristics. The precise aim of this study will be to analyse how proper names are dealt with in the two most established forms of audiovisual translation – dubbing and subtitling – using the German film Berlin is in Germany as an object of study. The Spanish dubbed and subtitled versions of the original German text will be analysed to determine the extent to which these two techniques may influence the final result, given the specific limitations of each form.

The article sets out to discuss Victor Klemperer’s use of proper names in his documentary work LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii. Notizbuch eines Philologen (1947), which is based on his diaries on the Third Reich 1933–1945. Emphasis is placed on a set of problems facing the English translator Martin Brady (2000) in providing additional background information on a particular name for an anglophone readership. As a chronicler of the 20th century, Victor Klemperer abides by ’the principle of exactitude’ – in terms of a precise observation and detailed description of political events in time and space, and the minute recording of Nazi jargon in everyday communication. Attention is focused on the names of political and military organisation and their representatives; of institutions and their official buildings; the names of towns linked with a propaganda epithet; the names of foreign areas occuppied by German troops in World War II, and popular bynames given to Nazi leaders, including Victor Klemperer’s own onymic punning with personal names. Martin Brady, as a knowledgeable germanist and well-read in Jewish literature, applies different translation techniques in choosing functionally adequate English equivalents for the German names in their respective textual setting.