Translation of the proper names in the journalistic texts: the translations of the names of French political institutions to Slovene

Abstract

This article focuses on the translation of proper names from French to Slovene; more specifically, on the Slovene translations of the names of French political institutions in journalistic texts. At the beginning, the proper names in Slovene and in French are presented together with the relevant differences between both languages and certain translation strategies. In the analysis, which consists of two parts, we first analyse the journalistic subcorpus of the parallel corpus FraSloK and then also the Slovene corpus Gigafida. The proper names in the two Slovene newspapers are translated differently and it is clear that the choice of the translation strategy depends on the target reader. In the news articles translated from French to Slovene, the expected translation strategy was transference, but the results show that the names are frequently translated to Slovene or explained to help the reader. The results confirmed that the context and the reader have the most influence on the choice of the translation strategy and they also show the tendency to explain those names that are likely considered to be unknown to the reader.