What is going on with Merriam-Webster, Mom?”1 My daughter
was boiling mad and in the middle of writing
a restaurant review when she phoned me from
New York. "Why on Earth," Andrea
asked, "does Merriam-Webster not cap
'french fries' when it caps French beans,
French bread, French pastry, and French toast?
Is it that 'french fries'—alone amongst its
French culinary brethren—has become a common
noun much like 'frankfurters,' 'hamburgers,'
and 'wiener schnitzels'?" Andrea's rationale
sounded plausible, so I said that I would
explore it and call her back with an answer.
Never, ever, take proper names for granted. |
Trying to make sense of all this as a medical
translator, I decided to track a disease that
was once as common as french fries:2 syphilis—euphemistically
known to English medical historians as the
'French pox.' Because of its incidence and
prevalence, I fully expected to find it lowercased
in Merriam-Webster (considered the foremost
authority on American English usage). What
I found, instead, is that it no longer even
warrants an entry in that dictionary. How
soon we forget the medical catastrophes of
our ancestors.
I kept looking for concrete answers, but was
able to report only more inconsistencies,
omissions, and doubts. Merriam-Webster, now
viewed through a magnifying glass, failed
to deliver a coherent treatment of toponymic
proper nouns and their derivative verbs and
adjectives. It caps, for example, the noun
'Americanization' (and the verb 'to Americanize')
but not 'romanization' (nor the verb 'to romanize'),3 and neither
does it cap 'frenchification' (nor the verb
'to frenchify.') Furthermore, 'germanization'
and 'to germanize' are also in lower case,
and so is 'to italianize,' but inexplicably,
it does cap 'Italianization.'
That same evening I got a call from my son,
Axel. I had translated his résumé
into Spanish and he wanted to know why I had
spelled the state where he went to college
with a single 't': 'Massachussets.' Well,
my answer was that I ran Microsoft's Spanish
spell-checker and it changed the spelling
automatically to one 't.' I don't mean to
pass the buck, but that's exactly what had
happened. It did it, although after consulting
all my Spanish style manuals I found no justifiable
reason for it to have done so. I must conclude
that Gates and I did not read the same style
guides.
I knew then that the MS spell-checker had
flaws in Spanish, so I decided to find out
if the MS American English spell-checker was
trustworthy. I tested the MS spell-checker's
treatment of other toponymic proper names,
and the verbs, nouns, and adjectives derived
from them. I discovered that that spell-checker
selectively auto-corrects 'romanize' to 'Romanize'
and 'germanize' to 'Germanize' even though
the Merriam-Webster dictionary quoted here
doesn't reflect a capped version, but it does
not similarly "correct" 'frenchify'
or 'italianize.' As far as 'italianization,'
the MS spell checker doesn't recognize it.
I often rant about the Real Academia,
L'Académie française,
and the Accademia della Crusca, but
it looks like American English is begging
for order.
If all this hadn't been enough to spoil my
day, I was surfing the web later that night
for transliteration of proper names from non
Roman alphabets and found a series of pages
from university libraries in the US asking
sinologists for patience, as they hadn't finished
converting the Wade-Giles bibliographic records
into the Pinyin system. That wasn't surprising,
given the monumental task that it is, but
what I did find surprising was that some sites
capped 'Pinyin' and some did not. Now weary
of Merriam-Webster, I consulted it anyway.
It categorically decreed: 'pinyin.' I then
asked my Chinese colleagues and they emphatically
said: 'Pinyin.' When it rains, it pours.
This article's aim is to take the treatment
of proper names in translation a little further
than where I left off in the previous article
entitled "What's in
a Name: Juliet's Question Revisited." I have here tried to red-flag some additional perils I've
encountered in translating proper names—this
time on toponymic terminology— from mere choppy
waters to lethal tsunamis. And I certainly
hope to throw an occasional lifeline to you,
but I beg you not to expect anything other
than rough sailing when reading it. In preparation,
let's take a Dramamine before we leave shore.
Shipwrecks
When I teach translation, I often give a simple
piece of advice to my students: When working
with proper names, especially names of countries
in sensitive, official, or important documents,
raise the register. I then tell them the story
of Furious Fouad. I used to translate the
monthly newsletter of a US hospital of international
renown for its cardiovascular services. In
one issue, the lead English story opened with:
"Fouad, a visitor from Jordan, is delighted
with his new heart valve." When I read
the story, I got a severe case of tachycardia,
for this man—who was simply called Fouad or
Fouad Lastname in the story—held the rank
of Ambassador of the Hashemite Kingdom of
Jordan. The hospital was aware of his accomplished
diplomatic career, and that is precisely why
they had showcased him in the lead article.
He was a man of unquestionable distinction,
and having treated him was quite a feather
in their cap. It is therefore beyond comprehension
that they failed to heed protocol and refer
to him as His Excellency, and that they called
him 'a visitor from Jordan' instead of using
his country's name in its official long form.
By the time my client called the Ambassador,
at my urging, to apologize for the breach
of protocol, only the Ambassador's secretary
came to the phone. His Excellency may have
been very happy with the hospital's valve,
but not with its gall. My advice is to pay
a great deal of attention to proper names,
for they are full of perils. Red-flag every
last one for research. If you spot mistakes
in proper names in the source text (and my
hope is that after reading this article you
will find them), do the necessary research
and then call your client. Never, ever, take
proper names for granted.
Swimming with the Tide
1. Numbers, Genders, Articles
A colleague of mine in the History Department
told me that when the Thirteen Colonies first
united, they would refer to themselves in
the plural, i.e., The Thirteen Colonies are.
Later, when the US became a nation, it referred
to itself in the singular: The United States
is. In order to respect the will of
the American people, he advised, the name
of this country should always be translated
in such a way as to honor that will for unity.
In Spanish, if we precede the proper name
of the country with the plural article, i.e.,
los Estados Unidos, and we make a noun-verb
agreement in the singular: Los Estados
Unidos es, the lack of conformity between
the plural article, the plural compound noun,
and the singular verb becomes jarring. If,
however, as I tell my students, we get rid
of the plural definite article los,
it becomes easier to see Estados Unidos
as a single entity: Estados Unidos es.
Regrettably, this quick trick is not useful
for translating into many other languages,4 but Spanish
translators should keep this escape hatch
in mind because it can sometimes be used.5
The use of articles is often thorny. We say
the United States and the Netherlands
in English; In Spanish, la Argentina
(or, simply, Argentina) and El Uruguay
(or Uruguay), but Chile never
takes an article in Spanish; in Portuguese
we say o Brasil and a Bolívia,
but not o (or a) Portugal. Yet,
for El Salvador, the article is always
preserved in English as in Spanish. When Spanish-speakers
travel, we keep the article for some countries,
but not for others: al Japón, al
Paraguay, al Senegal, but a México,
a Portugal, a Chipre. There are no rules,
just conventions. Ukrainians insist that their
country be referred to in English as Ukraine,
rather than the Ukraine, as a sign
of their independence from Russia. It is worth
noting that neither the Ukrainian nor the
Russian language has a definite article. On
the other hand, cities like la Habana,
den Haag, o Rio de Janeiro, which have
an article in their original names, may not
have it when translated into another language.
When encountering problems with articles,
look into the history of the term, see how
that particular country refers to itself,
whether or not it has made specific requests
as to its translation, and ascertain whether
or not the target language allows you to honor
those requests.
When working with languages that have grammatical
genders, it is not always clear whether a
country is feminine, masculine, or neuter.
Let's start off with the easy gender. Germany
(as a country name), for example, is translated
into Spanish as Alemania, and it is
considered a feminine proper noun (largely
because of its '-a' ending.) In German, the
-en ending in country names as in Belgien
is a clear sign of the neuter gender. But
we cannot always trust these desinences. And
consider Canada, that also ends with an '-a'
in Spanish, albeit with an accented one, but
happens to be masculine: Canadá
es bello. It is interesting to note that
in French the -a ending is not associated
with the feminine gender, for we have le
Guatemala and le Nicaragua. Likewise,
the -que ending may be either masculine or
feminine in French: la Belgique, but
le Mexique. Nonetheless, with a few
exceptions—like Israel, which is often modified
by the feminine adjective yaffa (beautiful)
because the feminine Eretz (Land of)
is implied—the gender of country names is
usually easy to research.
The gender of cities can be more problematic.
I remember seeing a sign in the French Riviera
that read Le vieux Nice. As a Spanish-speaker
who minored in Italian, I had always thought
of Nice as feminine, especially since the
Italian name of the city, Garibaldi's Nizza,
is clearly feminine. In French, however, it
is, at first glance, masculine. It was not
until I checked in Le Petit Robert des
noms propres that I realized it was deceptive,
as the masculine adjective vieux modifies
the implied quartier, not the city.
It would seem that Nice is also feminine in
French. I say 'seem' because according to
Hanse-Blampain, Nouveau dictionnaire des
difficultés du français moderne,
in spite of the cited entry in Robert,
there is no rule when it comes to the gender
of cities. Under Genre des noms propres
de villes, item 2, it states that authors
often contradict themselves in a single article,
but that the masculine seems to take precedence.
It further adds that even amongst the best
French writers one may find with equal frequency
Rome est bâti and Rome est
bâtie; Lyon est occupé
and Lyon est occupée. It also
states that when one refers not to the toponym,
but to its inhabitants, the masculine is preferred,
especially when used with tout: Tout Genève
s'intéresse au débat; le Tout-Paris.
My advice here is to do as the infamous Mexican
executive: Wanting to hold a meeting on a
Friday, but unsure as to whether Friday (viernes)
was written in Spanish with a 'v' or a 'b,'
he scheduled the meeting for Monday (lunes)
instead. So, if after researching these terms
you are still in doubt about a city's gender,
the only solution is to 'cheat' by recasting
the sentence in such a way as to avoid the
problem. Thus, 'We wanted to experience the
real Maastricht' could be recast into Spanish
without assigning gender to the city in several
ways: 'Deseábamos una experiencia
maastrichtense auténtica,' or 'Queríamos
conocer Maastricht en toda su pureza,'
or 'Deseábamos conocer lo que realmente
era Maastricht.' In other contexts, the
gender of a city or country may be made explicit
by adding the word city or country:
'La bella ciudad de Hong Kong' or 'el
desértico país de Kuwait.'
2. Spelling
The spelling of the names of places, cities,
regions, and countries should be taken as
lightly as a hurricane warning in Florida.
When proper names become pilgrims, they often
end up transformed, if not bruised and battered,
by the voyage. My family in Mexico City, for
instance, has lived happily for decades on
a typo of transposed syllables. Their house
is on Sierra Paracaima, a dyslexic
rendition of the mountain range between Brazil
and Venezuela called Pacaraima. And
similar alterations have happened in the US
as well. The City of Albuquerque, on its official
web site7 mentions that the city
was so named in honor of Viceroy Fernández
de la Cueva, Duque de Alburquerque.
Over time, the sandy desert wind eroded that
first 'r' and left the city with its present
spelling. And my home state, Texas, is proud
to showcase in its maps the quaint town of
Buda (pronounced 'beew-dah'), where long ago,
the story goes, the only curves for miles
around were those of a Mexican widow (or viuda)
with a good brain and an even better body
for business. Texas also has Bexar County,
a phonetic adaptation of the Spanish last
name 'Béjar.' Obviously, even though
as translators interested in proper names
we may be able to recognize these 'mistakes,'
there is nothing we can do about them now.
Don't even try to fix them or educate your
client. They are now set, if not in stone,
in all street signs, maps, guide books, and
search engines. It's a lost cause.
About ten years ago, I read in the Libro
de estilo of the Madrid daily El País
that it had made it editorial policy to spell
the name of my country of origin and its proper
adjective with an 'x.' Gone were the days
of that 'j' that made all of Mexico cringe.
So I got out a caballito, filled it
with the very best tequila I had in my cantina,
and drank to the fact that even though it
had taken a few centuries for the Mother Country
to spell us how we like to be spelled, it
had finally happened. A few years later, while
walking down the Paseo de la castellana
in the Spanish capital, I couldn't help but
grin when I saw a poster that read: "The
Ñ is not a letter; it is a Country:
EspaÑa." The posters were printed
as a protest to the then recent recommendation
of the European Union to eliminate the 'ñ'
from its computer keyboards.
Given my experience with that infamous 'j'
in Méjico, I read with interest in
my hometown newspaper a reprint from The
Los Angeles Times entitled: "C is
for Korea," where it is stated that Korean
scholars and politicians have begun a drive
to change the official English-language spelling
of their country to 'Corea.'8 The campaign is based
on an increasingly prevalent belief that the
original 'C' was changed to a 'K' by the Japanese
at the start of their 1910-1945 occupation
of the peninsula so that their colonials would
not precede them in the English alphabetical
hierarchy. There is no doubt that the missing
'C' in the English spelling of the country
is as thorny for Koreans as the missing 'x'
is in the Spanish spelling for Mexicans. As
translators, we must be extremely attuned
to nationalistic and patriotic sensibilities,
and do our best to honor the wishes of the
peoples of the countries whose languages we
work with. In addition to researching the
government web sites for the countries you
are working with, also check the sites of
the US Department of State,9 the US Board of Geographic
Names,10 and the CIA World Fact
Book for guidance.11
Sometimes there are spelling changes that
cannot be considered 'naturalizations,' typos,
or phonetic adaptations, and are instead a
result of a historical lack of agreement on
how a foreign proper name is to be 'adapted'
in a given language. Consider the example
cited by Moya12 regarding the German
cities of Brandenburg and Nürnberg. He
found each spelled three different ways in
the Spanish (peninsular) press: Brandemburgo,
Brandenburgo, and Brandeburgo; N&uecute;remberg,
Nuremberg, and Nurenberg. Why get into this
sort of problem when it would have been so
much easier to simply transfer them as Brandenburg
and Nürnberg? I doubt that readers would
have been led astray if this had been done.
In addition, the adaptations Brandenburgo
and Nurenberg violate Spanish grammatical
rules, for in Spanish there is never an 'n'
before a 'b.' If after checking the target
language press you opt against transferring
a term and decide to use it in adapted form,
make sure that you observe the target language
spelling rules as well.
3. Transliteration
As I briefly mentioned in the introduction
to this article, the Chinese government felt
that the good Sir Thomas Francis Wade and
Cambridge professor Herbert Allen Giles had
been leading the way for English speakers
to mangle Chinese pronunciation and argued
that the Wade-Giles transliteration system
of Chinese names was not intuitive. To correct
this, in 1979 the Chinese adopted the Pinyin
system for romanization.13 The US government honored
the request, but, like the New York Times
and other major newspapers, reserved the right
to select which names to keep in the Wade-Giles
system and which to change.14
If the Pinyin romanization, in spite of its
soundness, gave severe headaches to governments,
newspapers, map makers, and translators, it
gave heart attacks to librarians. In 2000,
some 20 years after the official decree, representatives
from the Library of Congress, the Online Computer
Library Catalog, and the Research Libraries
Group were still consulting each other and
senior administrators of libraries with large
Chinese collections in order to attempt to
identify the issues in converting existing
Chinese-language bibliographic records, associated
authority records for headings in these bibliographic
records,15 and related headings
in non-Chinese-language bibliographic records.
In spite of everyone's good intentions, we
are now in 2004 and most of the world's Chinese
bibliographic records remain in transition.16 More than 20 years
after the decree no one calls Zhongguo
by any other name than China, nor Tung-mei
by anything other than Manchuria, and we never
refer to Hong Kong by the Pinyin Xianggang.
And it gets worse, for in many books and articles
published today one will inevitably find Chinese
proper names17 spelled
using the Wade-Giles system, others spelled
using Pinyin, and yet others—because some
scholars are unhappy with either system—are
written in accordance to a third set of rules:
Yale University's nomenclature.18 If you encounter terminology
in more than one system,19 you may wish to contact
the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)
Business Advisory Council (ABAC) for guidance.20
Adrift
In spite of the problems created by requests
such as those made by the Chinese government
in 1979, it would seem like a simple tenet
for translators to honor the wishes of a people
and call them what they want to be called,
spell them the way they want to be spelled.
The problem is that sometimes it is not clear
who 'they' are.
Consider the fate of a safe, deep harbor on
the western coast of India that the Arabs
of the Sultanate of Gujarat had called 'Al
Omanis.' When the Portuguese conquered it
in 1508 CE, they renamed it Boa Bahia (Good
Bay), and then the British developed the harbor
into what is now the city of Bombay. According
to some secular web pages,21 in 1998
the Marathi colonists revised history to political
advantage and claimed that the original name
of the city by the bay was Mumbai—a name derived
from the name of the goddess Mumba— and further
asserted that it was the British who distorted
the name Mumbai to Bombay. Other secular sources
don't consider this a revisionist view, for
they trust the Hindu historical etymology
of the name, but are displeased because the
Shiv Sena party—with its fundamentalist platform—demanded,
achieved, and enforced (by some accounts through
violence) the non-secular renaming of the
city. It may now be Mumbai on the dotted line
on English documents, but the name change
is scorned and mourned by many.
Another politically volatile case is that
of Burma. Since 1989 the military authorities
there have promoted the name Myanmar for their
state—a derivative of the Burmese name Myanma
Naingngandaw. Yet, the CIA World Fact Book
states that this decision was not approved
by any sitting legislature in Burma. Because
of this, the US government has not adopted
the name, yet the US media have been known
to use it. If this were not problematic enough
for translators, the CIA graciously gives
us five different names for that country.
For mooring, always check the CIA World Fact
Book, but do not stop your research there.
Look for the terminology in question in the
target-language press, in atlases,22 Internet sites and
up-to-date dictionaries of proper names.23
The CIA knows, just like the Bard knew centuries
ago, that a rose—by any other name—does not
smell as sweet. Because of this, translators
cannot afford to ignore geopolitical changes.
If we think like Alan Clark, the former UK
Minister of Defense who, when asked in 1994
about Indonesia's continued occupation of
East Timor, said, "I don't really fill
my mind much with what one set of foreigners
is doing to another,"24 we will not only certainly
botch our translations, but in so doing risk
offending our clients and our readers. Onerous
as it may be, we must fill our minds
much.
Friend and Foe
Sometimes geographic and historical terms
are known by two different names. For example,
the occupation of Mexico City on Sept. 14,
1847 by U.S. General Winfield Scott marked
the end of what is known in the US as the
'Mexican War.' In Mexico, however, that war
is known as the La Guerra de Texas
(The Texas War). Furthermore, in order to
get to Mexico City, Scott had to cross the
Rio Grande, a river known in Mexico as the
Río Bravo. Likewise, what is
known in French as La campagne du Mexique
(The Mexican Campaign) is known in Spanish
as La intervención francesa
(The French Intervention). My advice here
is that unless instructed to do otherwise
for political reasons, to honor the terminology
of the target language, not the source's.
When there is territorial dispute, translators
and journalists usually attempt to remain
neutral by using both the name of the place
as it is known by the natives, or in a given
geographical area, and the name the opposing
party uses. This is the case of the Falkland
Islands (Islas Malvinas in Spanish),
of the Diaoyu Islands (Senkaku in Japanese),
and the quite incredible case of the Imia
islets (Kardak in Turkish).
According to the HR-Net Forum,25 in 1996
the Pentagon's National Imaging and Mapping
Agency (NIMA)26 published its updated
map of the Imia region, rocky outcrops by
all accounts smaller than the US Department
of State's Washington DC building, and labeled
the islets Vrákhoi Imia (The
Imia Rocks), under the sovereignty of Greece.
There was no reference to Kardak, nor
to any claims of Turkish sovereignty over
the islets. The NIMA spokeswoman quoted in
the article emphasized that the mapping agency
had "adhered to the State Department's
guidance in the depiction of Imia [...] standardized
in accordance with the policies of the U.S.
Board on Geographic Names." Since the
publication of that map, the State Department
changed course and now refers to the islets
as Imia/Kardak27 in acknowledgment of
Turkey's outstanding territorial claim. The
lesson to be learned from the NIMA incident
is that even the most diligent translators,
who will research all the authoritative US
government sites, may find inconsistencies
in the official sources. If this is the case,
contact your client.
Old World, New World
Another topic that concerns translators is
liberation and nationalistic movements, such
as those that have swept Africa in recent
decades. Upper Volta is now Burkina Faso,
Rhodesia is Zimbabwe, and Basutoland, Lesotho.
Moreover, when ideologies or regimes are toppled,
the winds of change sometimes sweep away 'new'
names and revert to the 'old.' This is the
case of St. Petersburg (Leningrad), Varna
(Grad Stalin), Chemnitz (Karl-Marx Stadt),
and Gdansk (Danzig), to name a few. As translators,
we must check the date of the document we
are asked to translate.28 If said
document precedes the official name change
of a place, then the former name ought to
be used. If, on the other hand, we are working
on a current document and it is outdated in
terms of proper names, we must contact our
client and ask for guidance.
Not only is it important to keep abreast of
name changes, but also to know if there are
any peculiarities attached to a name. Pakistan
is a case in point. I have often seen the
name of that country transferred (albeit with
a diacritical mark) into Spanish as 'Pakistán'
as well as adapted as 'Paquistán.'
I have also seen it adapted in Portuguese
as 'Paquistão.' When I learned that
'Pakistan' is an acronym representing the
various origins of the peoples who settled
in that geographical area in 1947: Panjab
(also spelled as Punjab), Afghania,
Kashmir, Iran, Sindh,
Tukharistan, Afghanistan, and
BalochistaN,29 I noticed that the
'k' in Pakistan stood for Kashmir30 and came to the conclusion
that at least in Spanish (I don't dare make
a pronouncement on Portuguese), that 'k' should
not be rendered as a 'qu.'31
Sometimes governments want to eliminate the
stench of death with the stroke of a pen.
Catherine the Great, for instance, issued
a ukase renaming the River Yaik the Ural in
an attempt to wash away the sinister memory
of the hundreds of serfs, peasants, Old Believers,
Cossacks, and noblemen slain on its banks
during the Pugachev insurrection.32
Yet at other times, it is the people who want
to remember bloody deeds. In 1510, before
the conquest of Cuba had even begun, the indigenous
population of the northwestern region of the
island slaughtered a Spanish garrison. To
remember the act for posterity, the area was
called Matanzas, a name it still bears to
this day.33 Less than
honorable urban districts are also prime candidates
for re-branding when opportunity strikes.
After the 1906 fire that destroyed San Francisco,
Morton Street, notorious for prostitution,
was reborn from the ashes as the chaste and
antonymic Maiden Lane.34 Once again, check the
date of the source document and handle proper
names accordingly.35
Pilgrimages
Faith and longing
may also color naming. Practicing Catholics
in Mexico, for example, don't just go to Ciudad
del Vaticano (Vatican City); they go to
La Santa Sede (The Holy See) instead,
where they often seek an audience not with
el papa (the Pope), but with el
Santo Padre or Su Santidad (the
Holy Father; His Holiness). Likewise, they
go on pilgrimages to Tierra Santa (The
Holy Land), not to Israel. Whereas devout
Mexican Jews, when traveling to that part
of the world buy their tickets to Eretz.
In similar fashion, Indians living stateside
pine for desh (the Country), and never
simply long for India.36
As I mentioned in the previous article for
the TJ on onomastic terminology, if
the translator wants his translation to be
understood and accepted in the target-language
culture (or sub-culture, as in the examples
of faith or longing, above) he would do well
to use the names of places in forms that are
familiar to that particular readership.
Landing on Foreign Soil
An exonym is defined by the American Heritage
Dictionary37 as "a name by
which one people or social group refers to
another and by which the group so named does
not refer to itself." Certain languages
favor exonyms more than others, and Spanish
is a case in point. Yet, even Spanish is changing.
I'm seeing, at least in the Latin American
press, more and more original spellings such
as Ankara, Tubingen, and Mainz instead of
using their long-revered naturalized forms
Angora, Tubinga, and Maguncia.
Yet, countries where two languages are
spoken, such as Canada, are much more likely
to translate names rather than transfer them.
As is the case of given names and last names,
the current trend is to not translate place
names, but rather transfer them along with
any diacritical marks they may have. The city
of Karlovy Vary, for instance, used to be
translated as Karlsbad/Carlsbad. In so doing,
the argument goes, it was possible to confuse
it with Carlsbad, located 30 miles north of
downtown San Diego, or with its namesake in
New Mexico—unless it was explained by a note
such as 'the Czech city of Carlsbad.' Likewise,
the name of the Brazilian city of Belém,
if transferred instead of translated, would
not be confused with Bethlehem. In addition
to offering greater precision, it is also
argued that transference respects the will
of the people of the source language text,
whereas translation (e.g. Rapa Nui/Easter
Island) and adaptation (e.g., México/Méjico)
do not.
My advice would be that whenever you encounter
names of countries, states, regions, provinces,
or cities, that you first turn to the official
web pages of the particular country to see
if its government has translated its toponymic
terminology (Canada has done so) and also
run a search in the newspapers of widest circulation
in the target language, or in the press of
a specific country or geographical area—in
case your translation will have limited dissemination—
before making a decision on whether to use
an exonym in your translation, or judge it
best to transfer the source language term.
Semaphores
Like names of people, names of places can
have meaning. As such, we often find them
used metonymically. Washington, Baghdad, and
Brussels—when used in this fashion—represent
the US, Iraqi, and EU seats of government,
respectively. Names of buildings can also
be metonymic, as The Pentagon, Il Quirinale,
La Casa Rosada, The White House, and
Los Pinos exemplify. The problem for translators
is that the metonymy may not be readily apparent
in the target-language culture. If this is
the case, the proper name must be accompanied
either by a full explanation of its varied
connotations: 'The Quirinale, official residence
of the President of Italy and symbol of the
Republic,' by a more restrictive explanation:
'La Casa Rosada, the executive office of the
President of Argentina,' or by an analogy
in order to provide a cultural or functional
equivalent: 'Los Pinos, the Mexican White
House.' There is a caveat to this last recommendation.
The White House, for example, may have more
than one counterpart in another country. England
is a case in point, (and so are other constitutional
monarchies such as Spain, Sweden, Norway,
Denmark, the Netherlands, inter alia)
where we have the official residence of the
British Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street,
and Her Majesty's official residence at Buckingham
Palace.38
The White House, perhaps the best known of
official residences, is often translated in
the foreign press (La Casa Blanca, La Maison
Blanche, La Casa Bianca, A Casa Branca, das
Weiße Haus). Unlike it, the official
residences (or executive offices) of other
heads of government or heads of state are
usually transferred, not translated.39 It would be wise for
translators to adhere to this convention,
but once again, we should always check the
target language press before making decisions
as to the rendering of these names into our
target language. But going back to the official
residence of the British Prime Minister, it
is known not by the name of a building, but
by a street name: 10 Downing Street. It is
worth mentioning that The White House is sometimes
also referred to as '1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.'40 Depending on the target
audience, the Prime Minister's residence is
seen in the Spanish-language press a) with
the street name transferred and everything
else translated, i.e., El número
diez de la calle Downing; b) transferred
as Downing Street with everything else omitted;
c) rendered infelicitously with the street
name omitted: El n&uecute;mero 10,
and d) also transferred without the number
but with an explanation added: Downing
Street, la residencia oficial del Primer Ministro
británico.
Famous streets, especially if numbered like
those in Manhattan, often get translated.
In Spanish, for example, we most often see
Fifth Ave. as La Quinta Avenida, and
Sixth as La Sexta Avenida or Avenida
de las Américas. There are many
street names, however, that are not as easily
dealt with specifically because of metonymy.
Street names that may not be known internationally
are often charged with meaning in a given
geographical area. Fleet Street and
Wall Street, for example, are easily recognized
in the West, but Wall Street's Canadian equivalent,
Bay Street, may require an explanation
or annotation. And whereas Rue de Rivoli
might be well understood in the EU, it
may not necessarily be in the US, where it
would help to spell out the metonymy: 'The
French Ministry of Finance.' In the work of
Jorge Luis Borges, Avenida México
sometimes denotes the Biblioteca Nacional
in Buenos Aires, and a translator might be
well advised to annotate the street name.
Likewise, translating the meaning(s) hidden
behind a 'Park Avenue wife'41 in New York,
or the typically younger, but equally affluent
'Sloane Ranger'42 in London might require
creativity on the part of the translator in
order to convey the exclusivity of those streets.
In all of these cases, annotations or explanations
may be the best solutions.
At other times, it may be possible to resort
to substitution instead of annotation when
the metonymy seems too culturally, functionally,
or historically "distant" for the
target audience. Thus, Langley might
become 'the CIA Headquarters,' Quai d'Orsay
'the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs,'
and Queens Park 'the Government of
Ontario.' As I mentioned in the previous paragraph
on street names, another solution for distant
metonymies is to annotate them: 'Los Alamos,
the research center for the Manhattan Project,'
and 'Bletchley Park, the wartime home of Allied
code breaking.' And finally, a cultural comparison
may be used. For example, Quai d'Orsay might
be compared to Itamaraty in Brazil. Whenever
any of these strategies is used, the translator
must verify that the information provided
is not only historically and factually accurate,
but that it also conveys the implied meaning
exactly as the author of the source text intended.
Landlocked
The administrative divisions of countries
are perhaps among the most difficult geographical
terms translators face. Mexico, for example,
has 31 states and one Federal District. The
states are divided into municipios,
for which we have a good English term: municipalities.
Regrettably, 'municipality' is a false cognate
because the Spanish term is much closer to
what in the US would be a county or parish
(in the case of Louisiana). In addition, the
Mexican Federal District is divided into delegaciones,
a division that does not have a counterpart
in the US. Other Spanish-speaking countries
have equally difficult terminology when it
comes to translation: cantones, comunas,
corregimientos, dependencias, barrios, sectores,
comarcas, and circunscripciones,
to name a few. Likewise, English has its difficult
terms as well, such as 'commonwealth,' which
may be rendered into Spanish as la Commonwealth,
as estado libre y asociado, as comunidad,
and as confederación, depending
on context; 'township,' which means one thing
in the US and quite a different one in South
Africa; and 'borough' with very different
meanings in Great Britain, Manhattan, and
Alaska. For translators working in Spanish,
French, and Portuguese, the Political Database
of the Americas43 might be
of help.
Moorings
In Shakespeare's time, Comenius (1592-1670),
in his allegoric tale about a pilgrimage entitled
The Labyrinth of the World and Paradise
of the Heart wrote that it is easier to
find a labyrinth than a guiding path. I was
fortunate in having colleagues who were my
guiding paths when I found this labyrinth.
To Gabe Bokor, a good friend and the very
patient editor of this journal, thanks for
keeping me from straying too far from home,
and for your extensive knowledge of Romance,
Germanic, and Slavic languages. Since lore
has it that labyrinths are solved by always
turning left, to my editors Axel Albin and
Hugo Enríquez, thank you for keeping
me from making deadly right turns. In addition,
I can't thank enough whoever made it possible
for my childhood friend, Gilberto Castañeda,
to weigh anchor and earn his Ph.D. at L'
Université catholique de Louvain—so
thanks, 'Fofo,' for all the brainstorming,
the French genders, and your encyclopedic
knowledge; to Ury Vainsencher and Francisco
Grinberg, M.D., thanks for your help with
Hebrew, a language that I neither read nor
speak; to Robert Paquin, Ph.D., for knowing
Robert and Hanse-Blampain like the
palm of your hand, for the Canadian metonymies,
and for keeping me from falling more than
once in this article as in the desert—may
Saint-Constant keep watching over you; and
to my former student, Rob, now known by his
students as Mr. Hawke, for tipping me off
on Matanzas when I was searching desperately
for name changes tinged with blood.
Boethius wrote in the 6th century CE that
every labyrinth is a circle that begins where
it ends, and ends where it begins. So if we
unwind this spool of words behind me, we will
inevitably end at the place where we began.
Lest we forget, a rose, by any other name,
never, ever, smells as sweet.
1
Electronic
version of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate®
Dictionary, Tenth Edition © 1995.
2 In all fairness to
Merriam-Webster, in their Manual for Writers
and Editors, Springfield, MA: 1998, p.
38, they do explain their rationale for not
capping 'french fries' in item 6: "Derivatives
of proper names are capitalized when used
in their primary sense. If the derived term
has taken on a specialized meaning, it is
often lowercased. Consult a dictionary when
in doubt."
3 Once again, even though
the MW Collegiate Dictionary does not
reflect a capped version for 'romanization,'
the MW Manual for Writers and Editors,
on page 169 'Romanization-Chinese,' does reflect
a capped version when addressing the Romanization
of Chinese and Japanese script. In spite of
the Manual's advice, for this article
I have kept 'romanization' in lowercase, for
I believe that it is one thing to talk about
the romanization of type and alphabets, and
quite another to talk about the Romanization
of the Western world.
4 French, for example,
does not allow for the elision of the definite
article in les États-Unis and
forms its agreement in the plural: sont.
5 The official long form
for Mexico is Los Estados Unidos Mexicanos.
In this case, the definite plural article
los may not be elided.
7 City of Albuquerque
www.cabq.gov.
8 For an additional article
regarding the K/Corea issue, see the Seattle
Times http://seattletimes.nwsource.com
9 US Department of State's
List of Countries www.state.gov
10 US Board of Geographic
Names http://mapping.usgs.gov
11 CIA World Fact Book
www.cia.gov
12 Moya, Virgilio. La
traducción de los nombres propios.
Cátedra. Madrid: 2002.
13 CUNY http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu
14 The
New York Times,
4. 2. 1979, 10.
15 Research Library Group
www.rlg.org
16 Not all Western countries
have adopted the Pinyin romanization. L'Atlas
géopolitique & culturel du Petit
Robert des noms propres, Dictionnaires
Le Robert, Paris:1999 has kept the Wade-Giles
system (e.g. Shanghai, Tianjin, Canton) with
an occasional adaptation (e.g. Pékin).
See page 82. Interestingly, Le Petit Robert
des noms propres. Dictionnaires Le Robert,
Paris:2000, although very comprehensive, does
not have an entry for professors Wade or Giles,
whose system it uses.
17 Dionysia Organization
www.dionysia.org
18 Wade-Giles, Pinyin,
and Yale systems www.m.isar.de
19 Transliteration gets
further complicated when you consider that
the Manual de español urgente of
the Agencia EFE (Spain), one of the
most influential style guides for Spanish,
adapts the Pinyin system. Their rendition
of the Pinyin 'Guangzhou' (Canton in Wade-Giles)
is Kuangchu.
20 APEC www.apecsec.org.sg
21 Mumbai/Bombay www.geocities.com
22 Don't trust all atlases!
Many printed atlases are outdated, and, in
addition, quite a few of these reference books
are copied from English language sources.
As such, they offer translations of major
geographic terminology, such as names of oceans
and mountain ranges, but leave the rest of
the toponymic terminology in English. For
into Spanish, see also Mapas del mundo
in http://go.hrw.com/atlas/span_htm/index.htm and Bolsa
de nombres propios www.europarl.eu.int
23 Two examples are Rey,
A. Le Petit Robert des noms propres,
and Faure, R. Diccionario de nombres propios.
Planeta, Madrid: 2002.
24 Famous Quotations http://jhut1.tripod.com
25 HR-Net Forum www.hri.org
26 NIMA www.nima.mil and http://gnswww.nima.mil
27 US Department of State's
List of Dependencies and Areas of Special
Sovereignty www.state.gov
28 For a wonderful description
of what this entails, read Alex Schwartz's
experiences as a reviser in the English Verbatim
Reporting Unit of the UN at www.accurapid.com/journal/25prof.htm.
29 Origin of the name
Pakistan http://geography.about.com
30 Cachemira, Cachemira,
and Cachemire are, respectively, its Spanish,
Portuguese, and French exonyms. Italian has
opted for transference: Kashmir.
31 The French name (L'Atlas
géopolitique & culturel du Petit
Robert des noms propres, p.59) and the
Italian name (web search) for the country
are transferences: Pakistan.
32 Troyat, H. Catherine
the Great. Meridian. New York: 1994 p.
214.
33 Portal de Matanzas
www.atenas.inf.cu
34 Maiden Lane History
www.spies.com
35 For finding new and
old names of towns, cities, and counties in
the United States, consult the Geographic
Reference Library at www.ancestry.com
36 Lahiri, Jhumpa. The
Namesake. Houghton Mifflin. Boston: 2003
37 The
American Heritage Dictionary. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, New York: Bartleby.com, 2000 www.bartleby.com/61/.
38 It is beyond the scope
of this article to establish a distinction
between heads of state and heads of government.
But in order to make this reference clear,
George W. Bush is both, Head of State and
Head of Government of the US, whereas Her
Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, is only Head
of State, and Tony Blair is only Head of Government.
39
Los Pinos http://zedilloworld.presidencia.gob.mx
40
1600 Pensylvania Avenue is an appellation
seen mostly in the American press. The international
press tends to favor the building, not the
street name, when referring metonymically
to the US seat of government.
41 McLaughlin, E. and
Kraus, N. The Nanny Diaries. St. Martin's
Griffin. New York: 2002.
42 The
Collins English Dictionary
© 2000 HarperCollins Publishers www.wordreference.com
43 Political Database
of the Americas (Georgetown University) www.georgetown.edu