Proper Names in Translational Contexts

Rendering of proper names in translational contexts may be a simple and automatic procedure that only involves minor sound adjustments. However, translators take, and sometimes have to adopt, all kinds of strategies with proper names, especially in fictional texts, where names almost always carry auctorial meanings that implicitly support the theme of the story. Names, in fact, bear a variety of connotative meanings and also serve as cultural identifiers of texts. Accordingly, rendering of names in translational contexts often has to deal with many issues such as their phonological, orthographical, morpho-semantic, and pragmatic idiosyncrasies, their accessibility to the target language readers, and their socio-political implications. Following the framework of descriptive translation studies, this paper first examines some English translations of Japanese literary texts from primary and secondary sources, and then provides a qualitative analysis of English translations of a novel by Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933), Ginga Tetsudō no Yoru (Night of the Milky Way Railway), focusing on proper names. The latter novel is filled with fictional and non-fictional names whose cultural identities are deliberately made unclear or paradoxical to support the theme of the novel. The analysis provided in this paper empirically shows that translation of proper names plays a pivotal role for sustaining the cultural orientation of the text and the theme of the story