Oblique translation of proper names
Résumé
It has often been claimed that proper names should never be translated when transferred from a source-language into a target-language. This impossibility to translate proper names is even considered as one of their less infallible criteria of description for authors like Witold Ma czak (1988:60). In 1958, Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet were the first authors to establish a list of translation procedures translators could choose between when translating a source-text into a target-text. They distinguished between two categories of procedures, the ones they qualified as 'direct (literal) translation procedures', and the others qualified as 'indirect (oblique) translation procedures'. They also explained that the literal procedures were to be privileged and that "literalness should only be sacrificed because of structural and metalinguistic requirements and only after checking that the meaning is fully preserved" (Vinay & Darbelnet, 1995:34-35). When reading accounts made on proper names translation, it appears that many authors insist on the fact that proper names should only be translated using direct translation procedures. We created a parallel multilingual corpus, made of eleven different versions, i.e. in ten different languages, of the same novel by Jules Verne, Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, to try and answer this question: do proper names only obey to direct translation procedures, or can they also undergo indirect translation procedures?