Browsing by Author "Gruber, Edith Klara"

This Pro Gradu thesis examines the difficulties in translating proper names in 'Le Seigneur des Anneaux', the French translation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. The theoretical framework is based on the works of Michel Ballard and Peter Vermes which deal with translating proper names and Peter Newmark's and J.C. Catford's translation theories. The theoretical chapter is divided in two parts, the first giving the definitions of various translation strategies, the second examining these in practice. Ballard's corpus comprises a selection of fictional and non-fictional texts in French and in English, while Vermes bases his approach on the Hungarian translations of two English novels, Slaughterhouse Five and The Last of the Mohicans. The purpose of comparing these two studies is to find a suitable classification for the corpus of names from The Lord of the Rings by translation strategy and by name type. A very important aspect to be considered is Tolkien's opinion on translation, which becomes apparent in his essay 'The Guide to Names in The Lord of the Rings'. The 250 names discussed in this essay form the corpus of this examination. Tolkien divides the names in two categories, personal names and place names. In this analysis, personal names are further classified as first names, surnames, sobriquets and peoples' names while topographical names are further divided into countries, towns, buildings, forests, plains, water bodies, mountains, etc. Having established the categories for names and translation strategies, Ballard's and Vermes' results are compared with Tolkien's suggestions. The present research shows that Tolkien favours semantic translation and formal correspondance. Furthermore, he has a very normative view of translation which manifests itself in his criticism of the Swedish and Dutch translations. To illustrate this, the quarrel between the Swedish translator Ohlmarks and Tolkien about how to translate names correctly into Swedish is examined as a case study. The analysis shows that Ledoux, the French translator followed Tolkien's guidelines very faithfully, although the choice of strategies diverges significantly from the usual practices of translating proper names, as Ballard and Vermes had established them. This is explained by the fact that the genre of the Lord of the Rings presents a particular challenge to the translator and demands strategies deviating from the norm. Tolkien created an entire world with its dozens of languages, cultures and peoples and hundreds of persons and places, which all are a part of a particular language and a culture. The translator's task is to recreate the ethnic and geographic relations in the target language so that e.g. Hobbits can be identified as Hobbits by their name. This phenomenon is called 'onomastic network' and its preservation in the target language facilitates the recreation of 'Middle Earth' in the imagination of the target language reader. Ledoux's faithful rendering of Tolkien's guidelines in French suggests that he probably had received them in some form, although he completed his translation before the 'Guide to Names' was published. The case study of the Swedish translation shows that Tolkien sent letters with translation requests to the prospective translators and therefore it can be assumed that Ledoux had also received instructions. Both the analysis and the case study also revealed the extraordinary status of Tolkien's books, both in the author's attitude towards his works and the translations thereof as well as the readers attitudes towards the translations. In the case of the French translation, the readers demand a 'better translation' but there is no reaction from the publisher. As a result, French Tolkien fans have organised themselves in online communities with the aim of improving the existing translation. Faithful to Tolkien, their primary concern is also the 'correct' translation of the proper names.