Challenges in Translation of Proper Nouns: A Case Study in Persian Translation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm

Abstract

Nowadays, one of the important problems in translation field will be Translation of Proper Nouns. This is an arduous task in Translation Studies to convey the main essence of the nouns amongst cultures. This is somehow due to the fact that every culture has its own system of rendering of proper nouns. Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (Richards & Schmidt, 2002, p.429) defines the proper name as "a name which is the name of a particular person, place, or thing. Proper nouns have disparate allusions such as age, sex, specific connotations, and geographical regions. This study scrutinized two major translations of Animal Farm of George Orwell. The first rendering is pertained to Amirshahi (2010) and the second one Firuzbakht (1988). Finally, this study seeks to investigate the translation procedures of proper nouns in accordance with Newmark and Vermeer’s (Skopos) theories of translation. This study shows that Newmark mostly peruses proper noun artificially to saturate the taste of the reader. While, Vermeer sets up the mutual agreement between the reader as the client and the translator in this process.