Alice in Wonderland - Bruno Osimo, traduzioni, semiotica della ...

understand the name as a description of the character. In the case of the
White Rabbit or the blue Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, the author
proceeds in the opposite direction, using capital letters in order to turn the
descriptive denomination into a proper name, which is bound to cause a
translation problem as soon as W. Rabbit appears on the nameplate at the
white rabbit’s house (see below).
In some cultures, there is the convention that fictional proper names
can serve as “culture markers,” i.e., they implicitly indicate to which culture
the character belongs. In German literature, for example, if a woman called
Joséphine appears in a story with a plot set in Germany, she will
automatically be assumed to be French. On the contrary, in Spanish
literature, proper names are more generally adapted to Spanish morphology.
A doctor named don Federico appearing in a Spanish setting (in the novel
La Gaviota by Fernán Caballero) could be Spanish or German or French, and
if the author wants him to be recognized as a German, she has to make this
explicit in the context. This is a literary convention that might have to be
taken into account in the analysis and translation of personal proper names
in fictional texts.
Geographical names often have specific forms in other languages
(exonyms), which may differ not only in pronunciation (e.g., de. Berlin > en.
Berlin) or spelling (en. Pennsylvania > es. Pensilvania), but also with
respect to morphology (es. Andalucía > de. Andalusien, en. Andalusia; es.
La Habana > en., de. Havanna) or seem to be different lexical entities, as in
de. München > es., en. Munich, it. Monaco [di Baviera]. Some are literal
translations, like de. Niedersachsen > en. Lower Saxony, es. Baja Sajonia,
and others go back to ancient Latin forms, like de. Aachen > es. Aquisgrán,
de. Köln > en. Cologne, es. Colonia.
31