Translating Place Names : A study on English place names in Swedish texts

Sammanfattning: This study looks at English place names in Swedish texts with a focus on which translation strategies are more common today, whether there is a progress from a diachronic perspective from translation to transference, and whether the prominence of each place name affects the chosen translation strategy. The thesis includes a corpusbased study of 299 place names collected from four sources, which were researched in the online newspaper archive found on the website of the National Library of Sweden. A chapter from Rowan Moore’s book Slow Burn City was translated and its use of place names analysed in light of the corpus results. The results showed that transference is the most used strategy today while part-translations and additions are also frequently used. The prominence of a place has been shown to be a determining factor in the chosen translation strategy, with more well-known places being transferred in English than lesser known places. The results varied between the different categories of place names (institutions and facilities, objects and works of art and geographical places) regarding the most frequent strategies in the past with some categories showing a progress from translation to transference, others with even use of translation and transference in the past and finally two categories where English was more common in the past than today.