Polish names of demonic beings in the The Witcher story by Andrzej Sapkowski and their Chinese translation - cultural determinants and translation techniques

Abstract

This paper focuses on the names of mythological creatures in the The Witcher story by Andrzej Sapkowski and their translation in the Chinese version of the text. This Polish fantasy work is very popular globally and has an extensive reader base and fans of games adapted in China. The study’s objective is to give an insight into the names of supernatural creatures appearing in the text, to outline cultural differences and difficulties in translation, and capture the mechanisms of their translation from Polish into Chinese (Lie mo shi :zui hou de yuan wang 《獵魔士:最后的愿望》 Wei-Yun Lin-Górecka 2011). The analysis gives an answer to the question which technique was most frequently used by the translator: it was equivalence along with the transfer of names from the source language. An intermediate translation from English was used as a version to refer to an compare. The names are categorised qualitatively and quantitatively, and methods applied to translate them are discussed in detail. The method that I use is, first of all, language analysis, followed by and an analysis of the original text in Polish and translations of a given fragment in traditional Chinese. For this purpose, I select specific names from the original and the Chinese translation to compare these words and analyse the translation mechanisms (and then to discuss them in the Translation Studies context). The frequency of occurrence of these words in the text is the criterion for their sequence in the analytical part.