Translation and the bilingual name semiotic landscape
Abstract
Translation and the bilingual name semiotic landscape
The name semiotic landscape is an integral part of the linguistic landscape and examines proper names that appear on name signs, inscriptions in public spaces, various surfaces, and extralingual signs referring to names. Bilingual proper name pairs that appear in the name semiotic landscape can also be analyzed in terms of translation. The study of the bilingual name semiotic (and linguistic) landscape also provides important information for translatology. The author illustrates the connections between the translation and the bilingual semiotic landscape of personal, place, and institution names with examples taken from an image database collected in Hungarian settlements in Slovakia. The analyzed proper names were translated through several translation operations: 1. transfer – no translation, using the original form of the name; 2. transcription – adapting the spelling of the source language name to the target language; 3. name matching – replacing the name to be translated with the conventional target language equivalent; 4. partial or loan translation of meaning – translating the source language name or part of the name with target language elements that correspond to their meaning; 5. full or partial modification – a major transformation of the name to be translated, its replacement by another name in the target language; changing the proper name into a common noun or with periphrasis; partial modification of the information content of the source language name in the target language by adding (explicitation) or omitting (implicitation) parts of the name.