Translation of Polish and German names of hospitals as names of institutions: in search of equivalents

Abstract

This paper attempts at analysing translations of German names of hospitals from the onomastic and translation perspectives. The theoretical part presents the place occupied by names of institutions in the proper name system, the views of scholars on their translatability/ non-translatability and classification of working tools according to Britta Nord. The practical part uses four names of German hospitals, namely: Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg, Klinikum der Universität München, AMEOS Klinikum Bad Aussee and Lungenklinik Hemer to present practical methods of searching for Polish equivalents, with selected tools used by translators such as bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, encyclopedias, acts of law and statutes, translations, websites and forums, and examples of names of Polish and German hospitals. The proposed methods of searching for equivalents can be treated as good examples for students and beginner translators, who have not developed their skills of searching for equivalents and mostly rely on information included in bilingual dictionaries. On the basis of the analysed names of German hospitals we proved that the same word included in the name of an institution may be translated in different ways, depending on the scope of the institution’s competencies, therefore allocating only one equivalent for a given word to be used universally for each name of institution is not possible. Therefore it seems necessary to sensitise beginner translators to have the need for a critical approach to dictionaries and the need for using other sources of information, since relying only on dictionaries often leads to wrong, imprecise or unusual translations.