Translators into Russian usually say that proper names are often simply given letter by letter and there is no need to bother translating them from English. It may even be seen in reality. Nonetheless, there is a special kind of proper names that are not subject to this rule or are subject to in only in part. There are a number of expressions that are partly a kind of proper names and partly a sort of common words. Here we speak of eponymic vocabulary. Before we go into this issue of eponymics any further, let us analyze a bit and find the notion of the word eponym and its derivatives in linguistics. The array of all words in the English and Russian languages is subdivided into two big categories: appellatives and proper names. The word "eponim" comes from ancient Greek, where it stood for "smth. or smb. giving the name". In theearly days of history eponyms appeared from the names of real people, heroes or deities to be later used in the names of cities, local communities, objects and even governmental posts. During this period of time the historic meaning of "eponym" became more inclusive, though it was used to refer not only to the a name of somebody, but it extended itself to refer to animals or an objects. At present, students of linguistics use the term eponym" to refer to a word that has ceased working as a proper name and now works as a simple regular noun. Hence, we work with 3 individual components of an eponym: 1. being or object 2. proper name 3. common word. Thus, the Russian interpreters while working with eponymisms have to deal with the problem of formulating an immediate assumption about the encyclopedic awareness of users of the English word and the users of their Russian translation. The connotation of eponym arises out of the etymological context. As Russian and English languages have dissimilar etymological background, there are non-similar ways in which proper namesturn into eponyms. Linguistic competence of a speaker defines the level of clarity of an eponym. In that case the question arises: is it okay for a Russian interpreter to think over such issues? A number of eponyms share a joint cultural context which makes translators job easy, for example superman" or Lolita". The same thing applies also to the eponymisms, which have lost their clarity in both English and Russian. (e.g.: Adonis named after a lovely guy adored by both Aphrodite and Persephone and murdered by a boar, or the game of badminton named after Badminton in the South West of England, country seat of the Duke of Beaufort, where it was played). However, the situation is more complicated if a some eponymism is transparent in English, and therefore it features some lexical connotation, and the case of Russian languge it does not cause any response from native speakers who fail to link the regular word and its connotation with an appropriate eponym. However, not every eponimism leads to troubles. Those that are hard to see through", do not lead to any difficulties to Russian speakers.
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