CHARACTONYMS: HOW TO KEEP IMAGERY IN TRANSLATION

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse and discuss the problem of “speaking” names in translation studies. A descriptive name given to a literary character often presents challenges when translated into another language. This article discusses main principles of charactonyms’ imagery of characters. This article gives an analysis of characters and places’ proper names in a David Yates’ fantasy film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and a short stories collection Tales of the Peculiar by Ransom Riggs, examining the names themselves, and the authors’ motivation for giving such unusual names. The authors employed the continuous sampling method to collect the linguistic material from the English, French, and Russian versions of the above-listed texts. The research drew on the lexicon-grammatical method, comparative method, description, lexico-grammatical transformation analysis, and logic modelling method. The authors emphasize the fact that the imagery of the name is often lost when transcription is used. The analysis of proper names in the original and their Russian-language equivalents is intended to show that transcription is not always appropriate. The authors come to the conclusion that only a creative approach, involving the adaptation of the name to the Russian speaking audience, makes the image clear and vivid. Within the framework of this study, all names from the abovestated materials were identified, analysed and systematized. As a result, the authors present six groups of names based on their morphological structure and describe typical ways of translating them.