Names: to translate or not to translate?

Abstract

Semantically meaningful names are among such translation challenges as phraseologisms or cultural realia, since their meaning is important to be retained in a target text. Such names are very typical and become even more important in children’s cartoons. This paper presents a comparative analysis of English dialogues and Lithuanian subtitles in eleven popular children’s cartoons on DVD. The cartoons have been released either in the USA or the UK during the last ten years and have been shown in cinemas in Lithuania. The corpus for the analysis consists of 114 semantically meaningful names (exclusive of repetitions). The study aims to find out whether the semantic meaning of the English names is transferred to the Lithuanian subtitles of the cartoons. The findings of the analysis show that the majority of semantically meaningful names are transferred to the Lithuanian subtitles of the cartoons by preserving the semantic meaning of their English counterparts. The analysis also shows that there appear cases when names are rendered in the subtitles by changing their semantic meaning. In addition, there appear cases of semi-translation, when only the first or the second names, both of which are semantically meaningful, are rendered in the Lithuanian subtitles. The analysis, however, is not aimed at presenting the tradition of name subtitling in children’s cartoons in Lithuania. Rather, it is aimed at finding the prevailing tendencies, problematic cases and their possible solutions.