Names, nicknames, and titles in translation

Abstract Translators need inventiveness, creativeness and flexibility, besides extensive competence to cope with the various challenges which almost any text poses: A) more general challenges in connection with realia, proper names, geographical names, quotations and proverbs, as well as in connection with special registers and recent changes in language. These require mainly a solid general background, that is an ‘all‐round culture’. B) particular challenges of revealing the author's subjective intentions in the form of, for example, humorous lexical creations, invented geographical and proper names, referential elements and allusions, distorted or parodied titles of works and publications, stylistic, orthographic and phonetic devices, deliberate mistakes, as well as jokes and puns. To deal adequately with these challenges the author introduces the method of “Translation‐Oriented Text Analysis” which devotes the first five stages of the translation process to a manifold ‘dissection’ of the original (whic...