Importance of proper names in fiction texts translation

The article under review is about distinction between proper and common
names, the specific nature of the names in literature and the mistakes that are often
made when translating them.

At the beginning of the article the author writes about the onomastics, which
studies the etymology, history, and use of proper names. The problem here is that a
proper noun’s definition became problematic even before it had been defined.

Then the author describes common and proper nouns, and comes to the
conclusion that a proper noun is usually said to have a reference, while a common
noun may have both a reference and meaning. This problem of common and proper
nouns was studied by many scientists, such as Mill, John Algeo, Bertrand Russell and
others. Taking as examples the proper names «John» and «Mary» and the common
nouns «chair» and «lamp», many of them came to the conclusion that as the words
«lamp» and «chair» have different meanings, so the names «Mary» and «John» imply
different things and thus have different meanings even if we do not know the people
they refer to. The author also stresses that the meaning of a proper name should be
ascribed and the reference should be established by the act of naming, while the
meaning of a common name is already a fact of language and needs to be accepted
and learned.

However, it is not enough to understand the difference between proper and

common names. There are also such notions as «embodied» and «disembodied»
names. «Disembodied» names are names taken in isolation from their referents, and
they can be the subject of onomastics. «Embodied» names are of no interest to the
philologist and should be treated in encyclopedias, gazetteers, biographical
dictionaries and the like, which consider «not the word itself but the things named by
it».

Then the author draws our attention to the fact that the relationship between the
name and the referent is different in literature and external reality. For example, if we
read in the literature about an incident that happened to a real person, we perceive
him not as a real person, but as a fictional one. Therefore, in literature, a «physical»
subject is always transformed into an image, or rather, into one of many attributes of
an image.

At the end, the author stresses that proper names demand a different translation
approach, depending on whether they are used in fiction or a real-life situation. When
translating fiction, the task of the translator is not only to establish the reference and
render the proper name into the target language accordingly («embodied» names), but
also to uncover the full poetic potential of the name and find the way to preserve it
for the target reader («disembodied» names).