Lost in translation???

[ninja]

Not sure if this is the right category to post this under but I'll try anyway. What I want to know is how come place names and country names get translated into different spellings/pronounciations. For example, Venice is spelt Venezia in its native language, Great Britain becomes Grand Bretagne in French etc. Surely how a countrys name is spelt/pronounced in its native language should be the same in any other language. If someone is called Steve, then this is their name in any other language so why doesn't the same apply to countries??

[LeMarchand]

This isn't menat to sound "flip", but I suspect it's because places don't correct you if you use their names incorrectly, while people do.

What we call other countries has changed slightly of late - Ceylon/Sri Lanka and Burma/Myanmar spring to mind.

[kempie]

It's not true that a person's name is the same in every country.

Take the case of Colin Powell, former US Secretary of State.  His parents emigrated from Jamaica to New York and named their son Colin (KOLL - IN) and yet everyone in the US (and by extension, the rest of the world) pronounce it KOE - LUN.

Perhaps sometimes it is easier to stop correcting mispronunciation and go with the flow.

[RevShirls]

Spelling and pronunciation can be extremely different and difficult. Each language has their own rules of pronunciation, spelling etc.

Just because a name is written a certain way, it does not follow that everyone will pronounce it the same way. In Sweden, Gothenburg is G�teborg (pronounced Yutteborree). Bj�rn Borg is pronounced Bjurn Borree. Ingrid Bergman is pronounced  Ing (rhymnes with sing) -rid Berreeman. Freddie Ljungberg is pronounced Freddie Yoongberree (the "L" is silent in "lj" combinations). I know from TV interviews here in Sweden that Freddie has given up telling people in UK how to say his name (most people in UK say Loongberg). Many people have changed their names when they have moved to other countries to make it easier for local people. The composer H�ndel's name is pronounced Hendel. The "a" in his name had 2 dots above it which is the equivalent of "e" in "hello". Since English does not these characters on typewriters etc it was written as handel. I think he eventually began signing his name in the UK as Handel because of this.

[Hgrove]

I think a long time ago it was normal to change foreign names (not just places but people as well) into something easier to pronounce in your own language (and earlier still, into latin as the "educated" language);  now that practice has gone out but some names linger on for historical reasons.

[JohnPPotts]

Not all languages have the same vowel or constinent sounds so it is sometimes simply impossible to transliterate a foreign place name into English (or vice versa) - apparently Chinese has no separate "r" and "l" sound which is why they are stereotypically said to say "flied lice" instead of "fried rice" since as far as they're concerned they don't recognise a difference.

[Peter Pedant]

erm because Grande Bretagne is French and Great Britain is English.

n Peking is Cantonese for Beijing and beijing is putonghua (That's mandarin to you!) for bei jing

I wanted to get printed 'I live in Manchester' in Chinese in China of course! We all agreed Manchester was man-che-si-ta but they werent sure what the signs were. Who on earth decides what the correct chinese signs for Manchester are? They sort of get used, and then everyone starts using the same ones, I was told.

[Earthlady]

Don't know the why, although the idea of the sounds not being available in another language sounds reasonable, so they come up with the nearest approximation.

Here in Turkey, the Turkish word for Turkey is T�rkiye, which English speakers would find difficult to read and "foreign" to pronounce.  However, we should be careful when using our anglicized word - most Turks who know any English know that a turkey is a large fowl, and many refuse to use what is apparently the same word to refer to their country because they find it insulting. 

[johngammon]

This is a very good question - why do we not say "Paree"?  Why do the French say "Londres"? - which I don't think is answered by the replies I've read here so far.

Perhaps the answer is that many countries such as our own are rather afraid of the change to their culture, their thinking about the world, which a change to a "local pronunciation" system would entail. Thus, the British soldiers in the First World War called Ypres - pronounced "eeps" locally - "wipers".  Why?  Somehow they were afraid of "going native" in some way, and I believe that most of the British non-coms came back knowing little more French than they had before the war.  Phenomena such as that show fear and not confidence.

Mind you, in France's case, I suspect the problem is more arrogance.  The French Academy, which pronounces on language matters, is very chary of change and of outside influences creeping into French, and thus any word they can is "frenchified".