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Do you translate peoples names ?

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Explorer
Portugal

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by Explorer »

When I travel abroad I often translate my own name in order to make life easier for the locals. If they have a particular interest in knowing my real name, then I show them my driving license and we have a few good laughs together.

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lrai
United States of America

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by lrai »

In 1989 Czechia and Slovakia overthrew the Communist rule in the Velvet Revolution. Shortly there after is when these two countries split (1992) and the USSR was breaking apart.

Last edited by dakanga on Sun Nov 20, 2022 7:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: derailed post ; removed because of moderation

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Gentianopsis
Czech Republic

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by Gentianopsis »

dakanga wrote: Tue Mar 15, 2022 11:24 pm

Originally posted by [mention]Gh0stwheel[/mention]

Do you translate peoples names ?

As to character names in books, I prefer to keep the original names, unless the name's meaning is a clue or has a bearing on things that happen in the book.

In the Czech language, translation of names of fictional characters is common, especially when the environment is not set in a specific foreign country. (Modern book translations keep the original names of the characters much more than translations made before 1989, when knowledge of foreign languages was very limited and using Czech forms of first names, if they exist, and translating or simplifying (making their spelling easy to pronounce according the rules of the Czech pronounciation) surnames and other names served a simple purpose: to make those characters more familiar and somewhat closer to the reader.) For example, Bilbo Baggins from Lord of the rings is Bilbo Pytlík (a small sack) in Czech. We also have our own versions of names of fairy tale characters (e.g., Snow White is Sněhurka, which is from the adjective "sněhový" = made of snow and the suffix means that it is a girl's name with a positive connotation in it, Sleeping Beauty is Šípková Růženka, where Růženka is something like "cute little Rosemary" and "šípková" is an adjective from "šípek" which is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_canina )

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Gentianopsis
Czech Republic

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by Gentianopsis »

dakanga wrote: Tue Mar 15, 2022 11:41 pm

originally posted by [mention]Oso-the-Bear[/mention]

no I don't think that they translate band names. Like the Four Tops are just the Four Tops, they even keep the "the."

Translating band names does not happen in the Czech republic recently, but in the last century, The Beatles used to be called Brouci (beetles in English, because someone made a spelling mistake, it was translated and became well known because of the popularity of their songs).

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Explorer
Portugal

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by Explorer »

Gentianopsis wrote: Mon Nov 21, 2022 1:28 am

For example, Bilbo Baggins from Lord of the rings is Bilbo Pytlík (a small sack) in Czech.

It's Bilbo Bolsón in Spanish, which means something like "big bag" :lol:

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Gentianopsis
Czech Republic

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by Gentianopsis »

dakanga wrote: Tue Mar 15, 2022 11:41 pm

originally posted by [mention]ARCANA-MVSA[/mention]

Yes ... The way I see it is that, no matter how similar two names are, that doesn't make them the same.

I.e. Kathryn is not Kathleen is not Catherine, Cathy is not Kathie.

The same, for me, applies to foreign names. Michel is not Michael, Žofie is not Sophie, Kateřina is not Kathryn or Katrina or whatever.

These names belong to the cultures and languages of which they are a part. I don't see the point of stripping them of that culture.

This is different in the Czech republic, where using Czech forms of foreign first names is still common, although it becomes little less frequent in the last three decades. For example, we call Russian empress Екатерина II https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Екатерина_II , mentioned in this discussion above (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_the_Great ), Kateřina Veliká (big, large in English): https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kateřina_II._Veliká

As mentioned by [mention]dakanga[/mention], we have "name days" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_day#Czech_Republic People are mostly given their first names in the form that is written in the callendar, although it is not obligatory now, and that is their first name in all their official documents. In the Czech from English course, there is the name Kateřina, that can be used as a literary equivalent to all foreign names like Kathryn, Kathleen, Catherine, Cathy, Kathie etc. that have the same historical origin. However, Kateřina is called "Kateřino!" (vocative, the word form to address someone/something) extremely rarely at home or by her friends. In the Czech language, there are plentiful forms of all first names, each of them has slightly different meaning/connotation in it and any of them can be used for the same person according to the situation. For Kateřina, these forms are Katka, Kačka, Kačenka, Kateřinka, Káča, Kačena, Kačice, Kačaba, Káťa, Kaťka, Kačí, Káčí etc. When you use a specific form to address the person, you add some kind of message to it (Kateřino! - she understands: "oh, I have done something wrong and I am going to be scolded," Katko! - she: "yes, I am listening, what do you need?", "Kačenko!" - she: "he is going to say that he loves me", "Káčo!" = "you are stupid, crazy, an idiot"...). Some forms used to be specific to certain regions of the country. If Kateřina is a character in a story, I honesly have no idea how to translate it to a foreign language which does not have this habit of changing the form of names, because keeping all the forms of her name in the text would be confusing for the reader and using the official form would need adding sentences describing the reasons behind the choice of that specific form of her name in the original text.

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Gentianopsis
Czech Republic

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by Gentianopsis »

dakanga wrote: Tue Mar 15, 2022 11:44 pm

originally posted by ColinCanuck

But of course it's not true that we don't translate place names. We translate country names all the time. Germany = Allemagne = Deutschland. Also lots of European cities have accepted translated names. Den Haag = The Hague, Köln = Cologne, London = Londres etc. I've no idea what the Mandarin name for Beijing is, but we needed some way to write it in Latin script.

In Czech, we also have our own names for these places:
Germany - Německo
Den Haag - Haag
Köln - Kolín nad Rýnem
London - Londýn
Beijing - Peking

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dakanga

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by dakanga »

I have just listened to a recent interview with ABC journalist Phil Kafcaloudes

Who recently did a survey about people changing their name.

And summarized the results of for his survey, of why people changed their names as :

  • convenience (spelling simplicity)
  • acceptance (easier to get a job)
  • fear of retribution (racism)

And there is now a tendency recently of returning to their original name.

see : https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/pr ... /101726210

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lrai
United States of America

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by lrai »

When my grandparents came to America it was common for names to get changed when you went through Ellis Island. The workers often had no idea how to spell a name and the person entering the country had no idea either, so names were simplified or even totally changed. A cousin of mine had their name changed to Smith, not even close to the family name of origin. It can make doing any family tree work daunting to say the least.

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Meli578588
Italy

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by Meli578588 »

[mention]lrai[/mention]

I have a similar background. I know what you speak of. 🙂My Father’s Father had his name shortened and changed it back .. Lucky for us , too ! My Father’s Mom changed and shortened her name. Too bad. Her given name is beautiful !

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Davey944676
Great Britain

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by Davey944676 »

Gentianopsis wrote: Mon Nov 21, 2022 5:00 am

In Czech, we also have our own names for these places:..
...Beijing - Peking

That's interesting. In the U.K. we used to call that city Peking, but relatively recently we started calling it Beijing. I'm not sure exactly when or why that happened, but it seemed to be quite a sudden shift, and it seemed to be because it became somehow offensive to call it Peking..

For example, a few years ago I heard some older blokes in the pub talking about Peking (in a conversation about football or maybe some other sport) and somebody saying that they now had to call it Beijing - followed by a mock, jokey argument about "political correctness gone mad".

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lrai
United States of America

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by lrai »

My Chinese is not the best but Bei in Chinese means North and Jing means capital (this is at least what I have been told) so Beijing literally means north capital which is correct. In China's past there have been other capital cities like Nanjing. Peking was coined by foreigners who couldn't say the original name Peiping, and later it was seen as a disrespectful name for the capital city. Even Peking University is now called Beijing University in China. The history behind names can be rather interesting.

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dakanga

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by dakanga »

This also brings me to the controversial issue of differing names for also a geographical place, group of people, language or dialect .

To this end, as this issue is a big topic - worthy of its own discussion, I have created another post about Endonym vs Exonym at : viewtopic.php?t=8984-you-use-a-differen ... -i-use-why

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LICA98
Finland

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by LICA98 »

Davey944676 wrote: Sat Dec 03, 2022 5:43 pm
Gentianopsis wrote: Mon Nov 21, 2022 5:00 am

In Czech, we also have our own names for these places:..
...Beijing - Peking

That's interesting. In the U.K. we used to call that city Peking, but relatively recently we started calling it Beijing. I'm not sure exactly when or why that happened, but it seemed to be quite a sudden shift, and it seemed to be because it became somehow offensive to call it Peking..

For example, a few years ago I heard some older blokes in the pub talking about Peking (in a conversation about football or maybe some other sport) and somebody saying that they now had to call it Beijing - followed by a mock, jokey argument about "political correctness gone mad".

it's due to the transliteration changing from Wade-Giles to Pinyin: in the former [p] is transliterated as P whereas in the latter it's B (and [pʰ] is P)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Mandarin

the K doesn't make sense in either transliteration tho, in Pinyin it's J and in Wade-Giles it's CH

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Dana_Dany Danuta
Poland

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by Dana_Dany Danuta »

Hi, [mention]Gentianopsis[/mention]!

I will tell you that in Polish these names sound very nice! :)

Germany - Niemcy
Den Haag - Haga
Köln - Kolonia
London - Londyn
Beijing - Pekin

Cheers! ;)

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Be smart and write poems. :D

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PtolemysXX
Uganda

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by PtolemysXX »

I am looking for a city that has the biggest number of different sounding names in different languages (what "different" means is of course debatable, for me names like London / Londen /Londyn are essentially the same). My favorite so far is the Belgian city of Liège (FR), Luik (NL), Lüttich (DE), Leodium (LAT). Can any other place beat this?

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PtolemysXX
Uganda

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by PtolemysXX »

lrai wrote: Sat Dec 03, 2022 11:28 pm

(...) Peking was coined by foreigners who couldn't say the original name Peiping, and later it was seen as a disrespectful name for the capital city. Even Peking University is now called Beijing University in China. The history behind names can be rather interesting.

Reverting the direction, Chinese face the difficult task to "transliterate" foreign proper names into their writing system. In general there are three possibilities:

  1. Names that are already written with Chinese characters, i.e. Japanese / Korean names -> they will (may?) be pronounced just as they are written, and so Tokyo (the Eastern Capital) becomes Dongjing.

  2. The vast majority of names are converted to sound as close to the original as possible under the restrictions of the Chinese phoneme system. Thus Paris becomes Bālí, Madrid - Mǎdélǐ, Frankfurt - Fǎlánkèfú and so on. The choice of characters (there are many characters with exact the same pronunciation including tones) is another story.

And then there is the last group, the tiniest one where a name is converted to Chinese characters by its meaning. So far I have been able to identify only one representative of that group:

Oxford - became 牛津 (Niújīn) - meaning ox-ford.

Does anybody know more examples of this sort?

I thought that maybe some other "old university cities" would enjoy similar treatment but I did not get far there:
the Chinese name for Cambridge is 剑桥 which translates to "sword bridge" and that does not sound like 1:1 translation.

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Davey944676
Great Britain

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by Davey944676 »

[mention]PtolemysXX[/mention] You probably already know this, but just in case...Cambridge gets its name from a bridge over the river Cam. Does "cam" coincidentally mean something like "sword" in a Chinese language? Or going the other way, perhaps "cam" means sword in some Ye Olde English dialect? Mayde it was known as "the river Sword" in the lingo of the time?

edit.. Wiktionary suggests otherwise, and that it's "the crooked river" but that doesn't necessarily mean "cam" didn't also have another meaning at the time. :)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Cam

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PtolemysXX
Uganda

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by PtolemysXX »

Sword is pronounced "Jiàn" in Mandarin Chinese. Perhaps in some Chinese dialects the word may resemble the "Cam" of Cambridge closer. So my guess is that the first character was picked "by sound" and the second "by meaning".

Steve579062

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by Steve579062 »

I learnt so much reading through this thread. I often see the moderators in the Ukrainian course explaining about names. Sometimes people get very upset.

I don't mind what you call me, as long as you don't call me late for my dinner.

I'm using language to keep my old brain working.

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lrai
United States of America

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by lrai »

The worst was when I went to get my Chinese driver's license and they had to put a Chinese name on the document. Without even asking me they just assumed they'd translate my first time and wrote two characters that sound like LoLi, when my students saw it they burst into laughter because that name means "young girl" and let's face it, I am no longer young. Now I am stuck with that stupid Chinese name on my driver's license. Well at least it isn't really stupid like a former student of mine who insisted on being named Jell-o :)

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Jimbo

Re: Do you translate peoples names ?

Post by Jimbo »

dakanga wrote: Tue Mar 15, 2022 11:41 pm

originally posted by ARCANA-MVSA

There are some exceptions, such as the Japanese course which teaches Western names adapted into Japanese (which includes significant differences), and Russian or Ukrainian with their different alphabets, but other than that, I prefer not to translate the course names.

All of which use different writing systems, and different sounds. It's true that nothing transliterates perfectly, and Japanese struggles with double consonants and words ending in consonants other than n (which is close enough to 'ん' and 'ン' most of the time). I'm not sure how much its 'The Japanese like localising people's names' rather than 'They can't quite wrap their tongues around the original pronunciation'.

pawndemic wrote: Sun Mar 20, 2022 12:35 pm

Usually we don't translate names. Eisenhower remains Eisenhower and will not shift to Eisenhauer . Michael Schumacher is pronounced the German way and Michael Jordan is pronounced English. But as always, there are some exeptcions. One of the famest is Christopher Columbus, who has in many languages a different name. In Spanish is Cristóbal Colón, in French Christophe Colomb and I guess in Italian is something like Cristoforo Colombo. Correct me, if I am wrong.

I might have always pronounced Michael Schumacher the German way, but I remember that it took child-me something like a year before I could spell it. I knew that 'Shoomacker' was wrong, but I could never remember how to get it right.

Translating of names of places, regions or cities is different. Some will be translated others not. I am not sure if there is a rule. I can't detect any pattern :D I guess it depends if there was a historical connection or not.

Sometimes it's historical, if a country was called something in a different language that looked about right way back when standardised spelling (even within a language) was an unthinkable concept, and then changed its name. I think Germany's an example of this but I might be wrong.

b05aplmun.ca wrote: Sat Apr 30, 2022 4:55 pm
dakanga wrote: Tue Mar 15, 2022 11:35 pm

Originally posted by Gh0stwheel

Oh. This puts the topic in a different light.

I think that the intention of the translation in lesson/practice sentences is neither to say we need to translate names, nor that this is the custom. The way I see the name-translation issue in Duolingo lesson sentences is that we are taught the local version of the name (when there is one).

I don't mind it in this case.
I get to learn the spelling and pronunciation.
I get to feel that even though the language is different, and the prevalent names are too, there is still some small cultural connection. Even if at first it is a little weird to translate names.

I think a lot of the difficulty people have with seeing the pedagogical benefit (once the weirdness is acknowledged) is that they are reluctant to let go of the understandable anger they've felt when they were first marked wrong / lost the points.

I've seen very much the opposite. In Spanish to English and English to Spanish, the names generally do not change in the accepted translations and people then complain (or, these days, I guess, used to complain) bitterly about losing points, because they typed "Anna" or (in one case) "Hannah" instead of "Ana" or "Sophia" instead of "Sofia."

People would get particularly upset, I think, when spelling was a problem in listening lessons, but often their errors reflected ignorance of general spelling norms in the target language.

To be fair, one of the voices did sound like it was saying 'Hannah' so I can understand that annoyance - Duolingo's voices are hardly the best.

As for Ana and Sofia, it felt to me more like a part of a general gripe at introducing new words in listening format. If the sentence was "Hola, me llamo Sofía" then it doesn't matter whether the beginner learner* is flummoxed by 'hola', 'llamo' or 'Sofía' - all of which could trip up someone who's having to spell them having never seen them before (I'd hope most people could spell the 'me' from sound alone) - the fact that one of those is a name is largely irrelevant.

*If someone's complaining deeper into the tree, or snake now I guess, on trickier sentences then, while there was still some frustration with Duolingo which did often come across as 'by that point wilful ignorance of general spelling norms', there's increasing amounts of venting about their own error often only done because of momentary absentmindedness.

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