THE PECULIARITIES OF CREATION AND TRANSLATION OF PROPER NAMES IN THE NOVEL THIEF OF TIME BY TERRY PRATCHETT

Abstract

The novels by Terry Pratchett have been extremely popular around the world for a long period of time. His works are being adapted into TV and Amazon series, radio and theater plays; computer games are based on their plot. The translation of the novels into Ukrainian has recently begun; one of the first completed translations is the storyline about Death from the Discworld series. Thus, there are no researches focused on the Ukrainian translation, which determines the relevance of the presented work. In general, Pratchett’s novels have been studied for a long time, although those studies mainly concern cultural or literature aspects rather than linguistic ones. In this paper, we aim to determine the peculiarities of the creation and translation of the proper names used in the novel Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett. Using the end-to-end sampling method, we selected 85 antonomasias from the novel Thief of Time with the total volume of 357 pages and their translations into Ukrainian. The results demonstrate that the majority of the proper names are allusive, which echoes the findings of the previous works exploring the features of Terry Pratchett’s writing style and the intertextuality in his novels. The rest of the examples belong to the groups of characteristic names and anthroponyms without any additional meaning. These results support the idea that in the fantasy fiction by postmodernist authors proper names are mostly allusive and characteristic. Among the collected examples, we distinguish a sufficient number of mythonyms, which is predetermined by the plot. Of special interest is the author’s tendency to humanize mythological characters by giving them names fom commonly used anthroponymicon. Calque and practical transcription are the most numerous ways to translate the proper names into Ukrainian. The insignificant rest is rendered by functional replacement and morphogrammatic modification. We also demonstrate that the translator tends to apply several translation transformations simultaneously to translate some multicomponent proper names.