On the translation-proper of toponyms in Romanian translations at the beginning of the 19th century
On the translation-proper of toponyms in Romanian translations at the beginning of the 19th century

Summary/Abstract: The translation of certain toponyms that had not yet been assimilated to the Romanian language at the beginning of the 19th century represented a real challenge for translators at that time. A first aspect to be considered here is the linguistic status as proper names and the possible translation options that could not be correlated to any tradition. A second aspect is the precarious stage of Romanian geographical terminology, reflected by the terminological variation for the same concept and the lack of semantic affinity, either real or related to the actual terminology. This article addresses mainly the first aspect mentioned above. The issues addressed are as follows: a concise presentation of the concept of proper names translation, the distinction between untranslatable and translatable or partially translatable proper names, the factors motivating the option of translating or not the translatable terms from a toponymic collocation. Our corpus reflects the incipient stage of the translation of translatable or partially translatable toponyms in Romanian, a stage in which the translator is free to decide upon translatability. Compared to the actual norm, the different choices from one translator to another or even those opted for by the same translator—especially the option of not translating toponyms that are nowadays translated in most languages—reveal the lack of importance of linguistic meaning (that is the lexical meaning of the etymon) of the proper name as far as its functioning was concerned, as well as the role of this non-functionality in identifying the linguistic status of a proper name.

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