Renaming Main Characters In The English Translation Of Legends Of The Condor Heroes:an Onomastic Perspective

Personal names,which boast a long history of generation and evolution,serve as the carrier of a nation’s culture.In addition to the referential function like ordinary personal names,personal names in literature,which always embody the author’s intentions,can indicate the identity,fate,or personality of characters,reflect culture and history,or express ideological and emotional values,etc.Therefore,the translation of personal names in literary works merits further studies as it is far more complicated than that of ordinary personal names.Legends of the Condor Heroes,as one of Jin Yong’s masterpieces,is highly literary and historical with different characters displaying distinctive characteristics.Their names are also endowed with rich meanings,which may cause great challenges for translators to appropriately convey and reproduce the connotations.By analyzing the characters’ names in Legends of the Condor Heroes and their English translations in terms of reference and meaning from an onomastic perspective,this study seeks to examine the meaning of names and personal name translation in martial arts literature.The results of the analysis are as follows.(1)In respect of the associative meaning,most names in the novel either reflect the characters’ personality,physical attributes,unique skills or social identity,or carry culture and history,etc.Moreover,the nicknames are derivative names associated with characters’ personality,appearance,identity or distinguishing features.Therefore,the translator renames the majority of characters according to the associative meanings during the process of translation,which can help target readers directly identify the distinctive attributes with specific characters and fully grasp the image and the whole story.(2)As for categorical meaning,in order to make readers better distinguish between different types of martial arts groups,the translator can use names with common characteristics to rename the characters in a certain category so that readers can group them together.(3)In terms of emotive meaning,the characters’ names usually imply the author’s emotions and feelings.For the positive characters,the translator usually uses commendatory words to render their names.For the negative characters,the translator often adopts derogatory words to rename them.Through the names with emotive meanings,the translation can better convey the characters’ images and the author’s feelings.This study also finds that two main approaches are generally used by the translator to choose linguistic symbols in the target language to rename characters after clarifying the meaning of the characters’ names: one is the implicit approach to character-renaming,that is,there is an invisible phonetic or semantic connection between the English name and the original Chinese name of the character.The majority of the characters in the novel are renamed in this way.The other is the explicit approach to character-renaming,that is,there is no phonetic or semantic connection between the English name and the original Chinese name.This study hopes to provide references for personal name translation in martial arts novels and to promote Chinese culture worldwide.