La Traduction des Noms Propres Français : Les noms propres dans les textes socipolitiques et le risque d'incompréhension du lecteur suédois

• Main Author: Olsson, Chloé
• Format: Others
• Language: French
• Published: Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR) 2017
• Subjects: Political translations; French proper names; Swedish proper names; translation strategy; toponyms; names of ministries; institutional names; names of public bodies; anthroponyms; names of political parties; Languages and Literature; Språk och litteratur; Specific Languages; Studier av enskilda språk
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-66874

When a translator gets a new mission, even though he or she has a lot of experience in the subject, there are great responsibilities when it comes to the exactitude of the information in the translation. The translator can be responsible that the reader miscomprehends the text if the translation is perceived as strange in the target culture. Proper names are very close to cultural differences and, as such, are quite problematic to translate. What the translator can do in order to avoid these problems is to apply a translation strategy during his work. This study has the aim to find an adequate strategy to the translation of proper names in French socio-political texts. In order to analyse different proper names and apply a method, we had to translate a socio-political text into Swedish, more specifically a part of a political text written by Denis Pelletier in 2005 called “L’école, l’Europe, les corps: la laïcité et le voile” which is about the banning for young girls to wear the Islamic veil in French schools. The study highlighted two matters. First, is there a specific strategy that can be applied to French proper names when they are translated into Swedish that are not well known to a Swedish reader? Second, are there any complications to solve in proper names that are related to cultural differences between the source language and the target language? In order to answer these questions we chose to use the theories of Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet presented by Jeremy Munday in Introducing Translation Studies. Theories and Application (2012) that helped us when certain translations of proper names were complicated and it helped us justify changes in the translation. The work on proper names by Peter Newmark presented in A Textbook of Translation (1988) helped us to identify six categories of proper names precisely; toponyms, names of ministries, institutional names, names of public bodies, anthroponyms and names of political parties. While analysing the result we found that the different solutions proposed by Newmark were not applied to each translation of proper names. In addition, the most frequently used translation method was the procedure of couplets.