Why are the names of some cities translated and others not?

Answer

Hi Eric,

Translating names of some cities – into and out of any language – has grown historically. The translations are those names that non-native speakers gave to a city when they wanted to talk about it with each other. Usually it’s a word similar to it but with phonetic shifts, because they didn’t master the pronunciation of the local sounds: ‘Antwerp’, for example, or ‘Bruges’. I also see ‘Los Angeles’ as such a phonetic translation, because only Spanish speakers sometimes pronounce that name with a Spanish pronunciation.

Sometimes you can see some shifting of the meaning in the translation: in ‘Anvers’ you can recognize ‘fresher’ for ‘to throw’ and the Spanish ‘Amberes’ is probably based on French.

If city names have never been translated (‘Bonn’, eg) it is probably primarily because they were so easy to pronounce in the target language that speakers could simply adopt them. New York is interesting in this regard, because it appeared in our newspapers as ‘New York’ until the 1930s. However, the English form has become so well-established in our country that no one thinks of the ‘new’ anymore. In other cities you can imagine that they have not been translated because it was less talked about elsewhere because the trade connections were not so strong, so that no other-language name has been created historically.

For a translator, cities are only one kind of realia: unique phenomena that are bound to an area. You can find out more about it via Wikipedia and also the article by Grit – Diederik Grit, ‘The translation of realia’, in Thinking about translation: Textbook translation science, ed. Naaijkens et al., Vantilt 2004.

Sincerely,

Sonia Vandepitte – Faculty of Applied Linguistics – University College Ghent