Despre traducerea numelor proprii în Joachim Heinrich Campe, Descoperirea Americii (1816)
Despre traducerea numelor proprii în Joachim Heinrich Campe, Descoperirea Americii (1816)

Summary/Abstract: At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Transylvanian scholars materialized their efforts to affirm the Romanians’ national and cultural identity not only creating linguistical works but also translating various encyclopaedical books from Western languages. At this premodern stage, many historical and geographical books were for the first time translated into Romanian. The translation into Romanian of the first part of Campe’s work Die Entdeckung von Amerika (Buda, 1816), illustrates this stage in the history of the Romanian language. Translating such new literature from other languages than Greek and Slavonic, the scholars had to deal with a large number of new and probably unknown proper names. In this stage, the lack of norms forced every translator deciding over the appropriate strategies of transposing foreign names into Romanian. The task was even difficult, as the scholars were forced to adapt forms written in the Latin alphabet into Cyrillic-Romanian. Moreover, the names took various forms, different from their original ones, as many as the source-languages involved in translation at the time. Having an intuitive understanding of the different way in which a proper name functions, the translator of Campe used all kind of translation strategies: substituting familiar names through their corresponding ones in Romanian (e.g. Africa, Eghipet, Franța, Genova, Marea Roșie, Veneția); adapting (graphic, phonetic, morphological) new forms and translating the transparent names. Lacking a Romanian form and constrained by the source-text, he adopts either the spelling (transliteration from the Latin into Cyrillic script) or the German pronunciation (transcription), without being consistent. He also transliterates the geographical determinants designating a cardinal point within composed names (e.g. Ost-India for Germ. Ostindien). The adaptation of the endings is quite rare and does not imply particular difficulties. Translating transparent denominative syntagms sometimes reflects the limits of the Romanian geographical vocabulary at the time (e.g. ostrov for Germ. Insel). Also, translating the names given by Columbus, or indicating their Italian correspondent, perhaps known at the time, has the role of an etymological explanation. Otherwise, translation is limited to the element that designates the (socio-) geographical category (e.g. the river, the sea) of a name.

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