Le traitement du nom propre dans la traduction des ouvrages pragmatiques

The corpus analysed for this study of proper names consists of guide books and unpublished working documents written as instructions for their translation. These documents are drawn from the author’s professional experience as an English-French translator specialised in pragmatic books. They reveal the complexity of the translation of the proper names of people and places. When parts of a book are translated by several different translators, issues have to be solved collaboratively. As with Think Aloud Protocols, translators’ briefs shed light on the translation process and on an overlooked characteristic of pragmatic books: their layout. Unlike literary works, pragmatic books contain illustrations and the text appears as a series of separate blocks with specific communicative functions; thus text and layout are intricately related. When dealing with proper names, the first problem is whether or not a name should be translated. Importing a name raises various difficulties related to the grammar of the target language, i.e. gender and typography issues. While not attempting to solve these problems once and for all, this paper provides a useful contribution to the debate by pointing out various criteria relevant to the publishing business but seldom taken into account in translation studies.