Harry Potter Character Names from English into Serbian: Lost in Translation

Сажетак

The paper elaborates on the idea that transliterations or mere phonetic transcription from English into Serbian of the main characters names in Harry Potter caused the names’ meaning to be no longer discernible in the target language (TL). Challenges of translation are posed by the fact that a richness of experience in L1 must be communicated in L2, and there are concepts in the source language (SL) which may be understood completely differently in the TL. To put it briefly, conveying clear messages to the target audience is not an easy task. It requires a thorough investigation of the underlying messages, followed by a careful selection of the most suitable lexemes to express the intended meaning. Adopting the Integrated Translation Approach by Snell-Hornby (1995), and applying the translation methods and procedures suggested by Fernandes (2006: 48−49), the problem of translating semantically loaded Harry Potter proper names is dealt with in the following way: (1) recreation of an invented name from the source text (ST) into the target text (TT) with the aim of reproducing similar effects in a different cultural settings, and (2) substitution of a formally and/or semantically unrelated name in the TT for a name existing in the ST. As it turns out, a set of invented names are not just allusions and analogies, but most commonly metaphors and metonymies, hence the meanings of proper names in Harry Potter are analysed within the theoretical framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Overall, the names prove to be neither exclusively translatable nor exclusively untranslatable. Rather, the quality of translation depends upon a translator’s linguistic and cultural competence.