When we allude to foreign proper nouns and toponyms we bump into a couple of linguistic obstacles, translation and transliteration, which present two different sides of the same issue.
Transliteration (which for us westerners is synonym with romanization) deals with the phonetic aspect, and basically consists in trying to write with a language’s alphabet the original word so that it reads as similar as possible. It is a purely linguistic matter and has its own rules (though often there is more than one set of rules for a given language). For instance, the toponym Харьков is romanized as Kharkov, the Chinese city 深圳市 as Shenzhen, and the Russian name Богдан may be romanized either as Bogdan or Bohdan.
Translation, on the contrary, deals with the “semantic” side — provided, that is, we can properly talk about semantics when it comes to names and toponyms. Quite often, rather than translation we mean “version” or “equivalence”; and in the overwhelming majority of cases there is no such possibility. Just think of the million placenames on the planet, or names and surnames in all societies, which have no “translation” whatsoever to our own. In all those cases, we can only resort to transliteration for referring to them. Languages only have their own versions for those names that for historical, cultural or political reasons are in some way or other relevant to the respective society. For instance, the Spanish Juan equals to the English “John”, since they share roots and very likely take origin in the very same historical character, whereas the Finnish Pirkko has no “English version”. (With surnames this is a bit different, since many of them do have a precise meaning, although to my knowledge they never get “translated”. Think, for instance, of Herrero in Spanish and Seppanen in Finnish, which both mean “Smith” but nobody would refer to Pedro Herrero as Peter Smith.) Same goes for toponyms; and although many original placenames may not have, from an etymology viewpoint, anything to do with any given word in another tongue, this one very often has its version of those. There is, for instance, no English word akin to the Portuguese toponym Lisboa, but throughout the centuries it has become Lisbon in Shakespeare’s tongue. On the other hand, the original name of Japan, which is 日本 (romanized Nihon), does have a literal translation into English: “sun origin”; which is why sometimes it is poetically referred as “Land of the Rising Sun”.
For what is left, I will focus on placenames, which is the point of this article. Continue reading
