Preserving the Integrity of the Source Text and the Functional and Semantic Effect in Translating Names of Characters in Drama
Preserving the Integrity of the Source Text and the Functional and Semantic Effect in Translating Names of Characters in Drama

Summary/Abstract: Charactonyms are very difficult to translate in a foreign language, especially due to their cultural, semantic and functional load. Especially in dramatic texts, names of characters carry a very important such load, which not only helps at the understanding of the message, but is crucial in the decoding process. Literary onomastics has to be taken as a separate field of study by translators of literature, because it is through names that some authors reveal very important keys to the text. The multi-referential character of names in the dramatic genre can be illustrated with the English translation of a Romanian play, Cornel Teulea’s play Marx’s Capital is Back as a Quantum Event and Kills Schrődiger’s Cat, in which we considered that it was of utmost importance that we translate the names of characters, as well as of some titles of organizations, institutions and parties. Much of the decoding of the text depends on the understanding of the names of the characters, as we argue.

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