Personal names in English literary translations from Czech and Icelandic

Abstract

This article presents a select survey of the rendering of personal names in translation into English from European languages with different scripts from the turn of the twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. Works of prose fiction were chosen from Czech and Icelandic, which use characters that are not part of the English alphabet. Their original publication dates are from the middle of the nineteenth to the late twentieth century, with translations trailing by years or even decades. The authors of the original works were very well known and in some cases Nobel Prize laureates. This gives assurance that their works attracted good translators and, in some cases, multiple translators. The hypothesis was that over the course of more than a century, there has been a growing tendency to respect the original spellings of personal names in translations – that is, to employ the source language’s script, even when the literary works belong to relatively peripheral European cultures. The explanations for this include increased cultural contacts, the expansion of what has traditionally been called world literature, and internet resources.