A PARALLEL CORPUS ANALYSIS OF TRANSLATION STRATEGIES OF PROPER NOUNS IN “HARRY POTTER”

  • Tran Thi Kieu My
  • Hoang Thi Linh Giang
Keywords: Proper nouns; translation strategies; parallel corpus; Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Abstract

This article examines the strategies used for translating proper nouns in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from English into Vietnamese. A parallel corpus of the English source text and its Vietnamese translation was built and analyzed using Sketch Engine to extract proper nouns. The analysis applies Fernandes’ (2006) taxonomy of translation procedures alongside Skopos theory (Reiss & Vermeer, 2014) and Venuti’s (1995) domestication–foreignization strategies to interpret translation choices. The findings show seven procedures employed when rendering proper nouns into Vietnamese: rendition, substitution, transcription, recreation, addition, copy, and conventionality. In general, copy (39.89%), rendition (42.11%), recreation (8.59%), and addition (8.31%) were the most frequently used, while substitution (0.55%), transcription (0.28%), and conventionality (0.28%) appeared rarely. The results also reveal that domestication predominated with 216 cases (59.8%), while foreignization was less frequent with 145 cases (40.2%). This indicates that the translator, Lý Lan, tends to adapt names to Vietnamese linguistic and cultural norms

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Published
2025-11-21