Frequent Translation Strategies: Proper Names in Three Children Stories

Children books reach out to a specific and substantial group of people, youngest in society. Their translation has always been at stake, since paradoxically, children literature is not bound to any geographical or cultural limitations and yet has to be made aware of some issues in the receiving end. The translators transferring the contents of these books bear the burden of delivering their message intact and undamaged, while they are also expected to localize. One challenging issue for the latter is to how to translate the proper names. In this paper, it is explored which one of the strategies suggested by Van Coillie’s (2006) model of translating proper names have been commonly used in translating three books with children audience ‘The Lord of the Ring, Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone, Song of the Ice and Fire’. Ten strategies for translating the proper names are analyzed in this corpus and reproduction is found to be the most frequent strategy.