Translation of Superheroes’ Names from English into Lithuanian in the Animated Series "The Venture Bros."

Abstract

In the article the focus is on the translation of superheroes’ names in the subtitles of the first seven episodes of The Venture Bros., a dark humour cartoon parody of the superhero genre. The aim is to see what translation strategies were used for their translation from English into Lithuanian. This kind of translation of proper names is problematic because of several reasons: (1) proper names belong to a special layer of cultural words in the source language that are usually treated as non-equivalent lexis in the target language; (2) the parody genre determines the connotations of the character names used; (3) subtitles themselves restrict a translator’s choices due to the technicalities of this type of audiovisual translation. The character names included in the analysis were categorised into reoccurring character names (32) and background character names (19). Most of the former were translated by way of loan translation due to their rich connotations while background characters were mostly rendered by transcription as they are usually regular proper names rather than symbolic names with semantic or connotative value. And although some strategies were used more frequently than others, the choice of the strategy was predetermined by the contextual information of the occurrence, which leads to the conclusion that even very similar names can be translated using different translation strategies when the context is taken into consideration.