Translation Technique for Proper Nouns: A Case Study in Fictional Novel Translation

Background: Dissociations between proper and common names following brain damage have frequently been reported (see Yasuda, Nakamura, & Beckman, 2000, for review) and suggest that these different word classes are processed by distinct mechanisms. The dissociations are often observed in people with relatively pure impairments, but might also be expected more generally in aphasia. There is the further possibility that the different vocabulary groups require different therapy approaches. Yet, to our knowledge, no study has explored whether treatments that are known to be successful with common nouns are also successful with proper nouns.Aims: This study had two main aims: to compare the comprehension and production of common and proper nouns in 20 people with aphasia; and to investigate whether semantic naming therapy is equally effective for common and proper nouns.Methods & Procedures: A total of 20 people with aphasia were tested in their ability to comprehend and produce matched sets of proper and common nouns. The stimuli comprised: 20 famous people, 20 famous places, 20 high‐familiarity common nouns, and 20 low‐familiarity common nouns. Participants were also tested with personally relevant proper names, such as the names of family members. In the second phase of the study 10 of the original participants were given semantic therapy for both common and proper nouns. Experimental measures explored effects on treated and untreated words.Outcomes & Results: Initial testing found that comprehension scores were generally high, with no word class effect. In production, proper nouns were significantly more difficult to name than the matched common nouns. However, this finding excluded personally relevant proper nouns, which were the most successfully named items. Results from the second phase showed that semantic therapy was equally effective in improving naming of both common and proper nouns. As in many previous studies, effects were almost entirely confined to treated items.Conclusions: Our findings suggest that proper nouns induce more naming failures in aphasia than common nouns. However, despite this, they seem equally amenable to therapy. Clinical and theoretical implications are discussed.

This paper aims to explore the strategies that translators adopt when rendering English proper nouns into Arabic and, consequently, offer both qualitative and quantitative insights into this process. It is a case study of proper nouns in professional Arabic translation based on one English novel (The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008); translated into Arabic by Taiba Sadeq (2011). Proper nouns are categorized and analyzed in terms of internal syntactic structure (Central, Converted and Extended proper nouns), as well as thematically (e.g. personal names, names of institutions, bodies of water, etc.), with an eye to establishing correlations between the type of proper noun and the translation strategy opted for. The results indicate that the translator’s choice between different strategies is governed by two main factors. Firstly, the translator needs to check whether the proper noun individualizes entities by means of ordinary language predicates (e.g. common nouns), proper nouns proper, or a combination of both, as each type usually requires a different strategy. Secondly, the translator needs to pay attention to the degree of comprehensibility and naturalness of his/her rendering, which may necessitate consolidating the single strategies of transliteration and translation with addition in the form of a generic word or even substitution in the case of idiomatic proper nouns. The paper concludes that proper nouns cannot be treated uniformly in translation between English and Arabic because they belong to different categories and, consequently, they may require different translation strategies including transliteration, complete translation, partial translation, transliteration plus addition, and translation plus addition.

Introduction Disturbance in naming accuracy and reaction time (RT) is one of the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Naming performance can be considered a diagnostic key in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which has remained diagnostically challenging. Although most of the studies in this field have been conducted on the naming accuracy of common nouns, others have shown that proper nouns are more sensitive for detecting the onset of AD. This study aims to compare the naming of common and proper nouns. Method Eighty pictures of common and proper nouns (40 items each) were presented to 18 healthy older adults and 18 people with mild Alzheimer’s disease using DMDX software on a laptop computer. The patients’ responses were transcribed into a pre-designed form, and their reaction times were captured by DMDX. Results Study results indicated a significant difference in the number of errors and RTs between proper and common nouns in patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease (p-value=), implying that proper nouns may be more sensitive to mild AD. Moreover, patients with mild Alzheimer’s had more problems in common and proper nouns than healthy older adults. Conclusion This study demonstrated that individuals with mild AD experienced greater difficulty recalling proper nouns, which were found to be more susceptible to the effects of AD.

This study deals with the translation of proper nouns found in Red Queen novel by Victoria Aveyard into Indonesian. It aimed to (1) analyze the types of proper nouns used in the novel, (2) investigate the translation techniques used in translating the proper nouns into Indonesian, and (3) reveal the translation techniques which were dominantly used in translating the proper nouns into Indonesian. This study utilized a descriptive qualitative approach. The data in forms of words and phrases were collected using documentation technique. Then, the data dealing with the types of proper nouns were analyzed using Newmark’s theory, while those dealing with the use of translation techniques were analyzed using Molina and Albir’s theory. The result showed that there were 185 data which were divided into two types of proper nouns, namely (1) people’s names, and (2) names of object. Meanwhile, there were 9 translation techniques proposed by Molina and Albir used in translating the proper nouns, namely (1) amplification, (2) borrowing, (3) calque, (4) compensation, (5) discursive creation, (6) established equivalent, (7) linguistic amplification, (8) literal translation, and (9) reduction. Additionally, there were two dominant techniques used, namely borrowing and calque techniques.

The goal of this study was to further investigate hemispheric specialization for proper and common nouns by examining the ability of individuals with left hemisphere damage (LHD) to perceive and verbally reproduce famous names and matched common names compared with the performance of matched healthy controls (HC). Ten individuals with LHD due to stroke and 16 age- and education-matched HC completed recognition and production tasks of famous proper and common nouns. All tasks were designed as split-visual field experiments, modelled after the study done by Ohnesorge and Van Lancker. Results contribute to a better understanding of hemispheric roles in perception and production of famous proper nouns, suggesting that (1) both hemispheres can recognize famous proper nouns, possibly due to a right hemisphere role in personal relevance and (2) production of proper nouns as well as common nouns is associated with left hemisphere.

Nowadays, one of the important problems in translation field will be Translation of Proper Nouns. This is an arduous task in Translation Studies to convey the main essence of the nouns amongst cultures. This is somehow due to the fact that every culture has its own system of rendering of proper nouns. Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (Richards & Schmidt, 2002, p.429) defines the proper name as "a name which is the name of a particular person, place, or thing. Proper nouns have disparate allusions such as age, sex, specific connotations, and geographical regions. This study scrutinized two major translations of Animal Farm of George Orwell. The first rendering is pertained to Amirshahi (2010) and the second one Firuzbakht (1988). Finally, this study seeks to investigate the translation procedures of proper nouns in accordance with Newmark and Vermeer’s (Skopos) theories of translation. This study shows that Newmark mostly peruses proper noun artificially to saturate the taste of the reader. While, Vermeer sets up the mutual agreement between the reader as the client and the translator in this process.

The aims of this research is to describe the single translation technique and the multiple translation technique applied to the lyrics of the song 'Uchiage Hanabi' covered by Andi Adinata's song into Indonesian. In this research, the data are taken from video of Andi Adinata. The theories of translation technique used is the theory of Molina and Albir . The method used a descriptive qualitative method which consists of three stages, namely, the data collection stage, the data analysis and the presentation of the data analysis results. The data collection methods and techniques used are the listening method and the note-taking technique. Data analysis methods and techniques used are intralingua matching methods and determining element sorting techniques. The method used in presenting the results of data analysis is an informal presentation method. The results of this study indicate that there are 5 types of single translation techniques, namely 1 data literal translation technique, 2 data of modulation translation techniques, word to word is 5 data translation techniques, common equivalent translation techniques 2 data and 2 data amplification translation techniques, and the types of multiple translation techniques, namely amplification translation techniques with 4 data literals, amplification translation techniques with 1 data modulation, modulation translation techniques with 3 literals data and modulation translation techniques with the usual equivalent 2 data.

This paper addresses the issue of how proper nouns function in intercultural communication. Proper nouns are discussed in terms of translation teaching and bilingual lexicography. This paper is to draw young translators’ attention to proper nouns, familiarise them with translation techniques and potential problems with proper noun translation that can result in certain gaps and lexicographic inconsistencies. The lexicographic material of Polish proper names translated into Russian is used to discuss that issue. The author of the study focuses on the Polish toponyms and their derivatives. The paper provides numerous names of places and regions that have their well-established Russian counterparts and toponyms whose counterparts are optional, unstable or even unreliable. The practice of translating proper nouns and the principle of transcription are studied on the basis of Polish cities/towns with their derivational bases ending with -ow, e.g. Krakow, Rzeszow, Augustow. Referring to dictionary data, maps, translated and parallel texts, the paper also indicates different ways of writing the same toponyms in Russian. Translating place names that are noun-adjective or adjective-adjective compounds, e.g. Biala Podlaska, Ostrowiec Świetokrzyski, Nowy Sącz can be questionable. It emerges that lexicographers’ guidelines on the declension of that type of proper nouns are ambiguous. By referring to other works on that subject, the author indicates certain methods to overcome the problem of troublesome declension of such compounds in Russian. The ways certain names of Polish voivodships are written in Russian can be arguable. For example, the Podlaskie voivodship can be written in three different ways in Russian. Derivatives of place names can become a starting point for studying productive adjectival suffixes in Russian, regular derivation and loan translation. That issue is also discussed, for instance, in case of adjectives that are included in compound names of national parks.

The present study examines the dynamics of the kanji combinations that form common (or general) and proper nouns in Japanese. The following three results were obtained. First, the degree of distribution results from two similar processes which are based on a steady-state of birth-and-death processes with different birth and death rates, resulting in a positive negative binomial distribution with the proper nouns and in a positive Waring distribution with common nouns. Second, all rank-frequency distributions follow the negative hypergeometric distribution used very frequently in ranking problems. Third, the building of kanji compounds follows a dissortative strategy. The higher the outdegree of a kanji, the more it prefers kanji with lower indegrees. A linear dependence can be observed with common nouns, whereas the relationship between compounded kanji is rather curvilinear with proper nouns. The actual analytical expression is not yet known.

Proper nouns are particular nouns that identify a unique person, place, thing, or idea, and they are generally easy to identify. But the age of computer technology has introduced new sets of words that seem so important yet lack the true distinction of proper noun, and I too have fallen prey to the technological times; cringing as the word internet usurps its common place in the world of nouns and bestows upon itself a capital I . The internet is a shortening of the word inter and network. In 1986, the U.S. Department of Defense used the word internet to describe “the linked computer networks of the U.S. Defense Department” [1]. As institutions developed their own internet systems, the word intranet emerged as a way to differentiate the internal system from the one and only internet. Yet, Internet justifiers and internet detractors have voiced their concerns. Justifiers of the capital I argue that the Internet is a unique thing, and they encourage users to capitalize the I when referring to the Internet and a lowercase i when speaking of an internet system. Detractors cite other common nouns that have not reached proper nouns status and argue that the internet has not earned the place of proper noun. Some publications (the London Times and others) have decided to use a lower case i , while other publications keep the capital I. The argument hinges on usage. Internet detractors and internet justifiers voice valuable opinions about the use of common and proper nouns. Although the editors of the Journal of Medical Toxicology have never established a formal policy on the use of the word internet, it defers to general rules of grammar when identifying common and proper nouns. I tend to argue that the internet has not earned the same right as the Theory of Relativity or surpassed the common rights of the universe because the internet loosely refers to a “vast computer network linking smaller computers worldwide” [2]. The internet shares the same conceptual definition as the one and only universe, a common noun that links a whole.

This study identified and cataloged the legends of place names and historical figures from a compilation of oral narratives collected from nine regions nationwide, as documented in the 『Comprehensive Korean Oral Literature』 and the 『Complementary Edition of Comprehensive Korean Oral Literature』. For this, text mining techniques were employed, involving the analysis process of “data collection → preprocessing of regional information → preprocessing of proper nouns → analysis of regional folklore → data generation.” First, we collected data on 26,542 oral narrative titles and preprocessed the regional information, which was not organized by administrative divisions at the “provincial” level. Subsequently, we categorized the data into nine regions. Next, we conducted a task to identify proper nouns that were not recognized by the morphological analyzer and registered them as nouns. In this process, we used the “associated word network” analysis technique to identify proper nouns. Once the preprocessing task of verifying and modifying the proper nouns was completed, we extracted the frequency of the nouns in each region. Then, to select nouns that guarantee the uniqueness of the region, the frequency was “normalized” and the value was “scaled.” Additionally, the criterion for selecting the unique place names and people of each region was defined by the term “maximum regional share” and selected as 80%.
 As a result, 520 nouns were extracted, of which only proper nouns corresponding to place and personal names were filtered. Based on this, for legends of place names, place names were classified into “natural features,” “artificial features,” and “village names” for each region, according to the “nature of the evidence.” This list has been compiled. In the legends of historical figures, the corresponding personal names are presented for each region. Legends of place names are crucial as they reveal how residents of each region shape and give meaning to their lives in the “space where history intersects.” However, legends of historical figures deserve attention for their exploration of individuals in the region who have been marginalized or excluded from historical awareness accumulated over time and documented in written records.

The terms "common noun" and "proper name" encode two dichotomies that are often conflated. This paper explores the possibility of the other combinations—"common name" and "proper noun"—and concludes that both exist on the basis of their morphosyntactic behavior. In support of common names, inflectional regularization is determined to result from a "name" layer in the structure, meaning that common nouns that regularize are, in fact, common names (computer mouses, tailor’s gooses). In support of proper nouns, there are bare singular count nouns in English that receive definite interpretations and seem to be licensed as arguments by the same null determiner as proper names (I left town, she works at home). Not only does a four-way distinction between nouns, names, proper nouns, and proper names achieve greater empirical coverage, but it also captures the independent morphosyntactic effects of [PROPER] and [NAME] as features on D and N, respectively.

Proper and common nouns: Form class judgments in Broca's aphasia

This paper investigates differences in encoding the two nominal categories case and definiteness between proper nouns (more precisely anthroponyms) and common nouns, based on a maximally diverse 40-language sample. These differences can be found in a number of unrelated languages, though the majority of languages appear to not distinguish between proper and common nouns. However, this generalization has to be taken with a grain of salt, since the paper illustrates that differences between the two types of nouns can be very subtle and can thus be easily overlooked or left untreated in written grammars. Differences are either manifested in the overall absence of marking of a category on one type of nominal, or in distinct forms and/or conditions for the encoding.

8 - Capitalisation