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.

The present paper deals with the transcription issues of personal names in the intercultural communication and the East – West migration within Europe, especially after 1990. The difficulties in the area result from the various spelling systems, especially between the Latin and Cyrillic script, but also from the usage of various national norms of practical transcription or transliteration. In the Slovak Republic, in official communication and documentation (birth certificates, ‘Abitur’ certificates, diploma certificates, etc.) transcription following the guidelines of the Ministry of Culture of SR using the letters of the Slovak alphabet is required; which, however, does not correlate with the English transcription. Thus, it is difficult for translators to reproduce the documents originally written in the Cyrillic script in such a manner, which would not cause miscommunication, because a migrant’s first official document is a passport, using the transcription of personal names based on the English spelling norm. A specific problem lies in the transcription of Hebrew anthroponyms from Cyrillic to Latin script, as that can result in phonetic dissonance.

“Translating Geographical Names (Hungarian-German)”. Translating proper names (nomina propria) is an often debated question in Translation Studies. The translability of names is, by all probability, in close connection with the semantic structure and the invariance of their meaning. The opinions vary from total denial of translability to presentation of differentiated translation methods. The present study deals with the translation of geographic names from Hungarian to German. It shows different strategies from unaltered loanwords to interlingual allonyms, and to real translations. The translation strategies of names in case of Hungarian-German relation is obviously in close connection with the strong linguistic and cultural bonds between the two languages, the familiarity and importance of the denotatums. As it can be seen, the translation of geographical names in in the junction of linguistic, cultural, pragmatics and language policy considerations.

The city of Freiburg/Fribourg in western Switzerland has since its foundation in 1157 always been situated on the limit between the french and the german language. This fits also the canton of Fribourg, which counts one third german and two thirds french speaking inhabitants. The street and familynames as well as the geographical names are therefore mostly bilingual. Nevertheless the officially leading language could change during the centuries. The origin of the names went according to different scenarios: Immediate or later translation, borrowing and adaptation or sometimes one single name für both communities. Political motives made noble families translate their names whereas the generalisation of exonyms was due to the sens of order of ancient administration.

The name of the river Lambro/Lambrus near Milano (Italy/Roman province Gallia-Transpadana) will be reconstructed as indoeuropean *h1lṇgwhró-s ‘quick’. Compared with other geographic names it will be supposed, that Lambrus is a celtic relict name. The problem is, in which way celtic labiovelars, e.g. /gw/, are integrated in the post-celtic languages.