Culture-bound and equivalent-lacking words

§5. TRANSLATING GEOGRAPHICAL TERMS

Toponyms are normally transcribed or transliterated: Oxford – Оксфорд, Находка – Nakhodka. Now the tendency towards transcription prevails over the tendency towards transliteration – some decades ago one should render Stratford-on-Avon as Статфорд-на-Авоне, now it is Стратфорд–он-Эйвон. Likewise: Комсомольск-на-Амуре should be rendered Komsomolsk-na-Amure rather than Komsomolsk-on-the-Amur.

Care should be taken to revert to non-naturalized place-names: Beijing is not *Бейцзин in Russian, but Пекин, Leghorn is Ливорно, and Munich is known to Russians as Мюнхен. In rendering, a translator should check all terms in the most recent atlas. Bilingual general and specialized dictionaries may be consulted (especially –English-Russian and Russian-English Geographical Dictionary by M.V.Gorskaya¹⁵⁵). A term found must be carefully checked in monolingual dictionaries.
Transparent local geographical names can be translated by calques: Rocky Mountains – Скалистые горы, Saint Helena Island – остров Святой Елены, залив Золотой Рог – Golden Horn Bay.
Half-calques can be used to translate toponyms with classifiers, such as river, lake, bridge: Waterloo Bridge – мост Ватерлоо, Salt Lake City – город Солт-Лэйк-Сити.
If a toponym is a little-known proper name, it is normally transferred (transcribed) with the addition of some generic information (Dalnegorsk, a small mining town in Primorski Region). Names of states are usually clarified: Seattle, Washington – (город) Сиэтл, штат Вашингтон.
Some toponyms are substituted in translation: Strait of Dover – Па-де-Кале, the English Channel – Ла-Манш. However, it is important to avoid wrong associations in substitution. For example, Приморский край is sometimes translated as Maritime Territory, which sometimes confuses English-speaking receptors mistake it for the Canadian Maritime Province.
Chinese place names are usually written in the Pinyin spelling. If the new Pinyin spelling is so radically different from the traditional spelling that a reader might be confused, it is necessary to provide the Pinyin spelling followed by the traditional spelling in parentheses. For example, the city of Fuzhou (Foochow). Traditional spelling is used for the following place names: Canto, China, Inner Mongolia, Shanghai, Tibet.