Based on theatricality, humour and camp aesthetics, the novel Lubiewo (2005) by the Polish writer Michał Witkowski recounts the tragicomic lives and adventures of Polish queers under Communism. One of the main features of the novel is the meaning-bearing nicknames of the characters, which result from the camp practice of “queer renaming”. This relies on transforming or substituting male proper names with ironic and witty female nicknames. The paper analyses the German, French, English and Czech translations of the novel to explain the strategies used to render such “talking nouns” in new linguistic-cultural contexts.

The article focuses on the translation of non-literary Chinese proper names, a subject which to date has not enjoyed much research interest as a result of the common belief that proper names are untranslatable. The article discusses techniques used in the translation of Chinese anthroponyms, toponyms and brand names into Polish and English. The author refers to the strategies used in the process of transferring names to the target language and presents the consequences of applying given techniques from the cognitive perspective, which entails analysing the names in terms of their structure and meaning. Particular attention is paid to the connotations of the names, the impact they have on the speakers of a given language, as well as the mental images that can be derived from their structure. In the contrastive analysis of the names of tourist locations in Beijing and their Polish and English equivalents, the author applies the cognitive grammar approach as developed by Ronald W. Langacker. The image schemas of the names are used to present the distinct conceptualizations embodied in the names with the same references in diff erent languages. One of the chapters describes how European names are adapted into Chinese. The study also provides an overview of the characteristics of the Chinese onomasticon, a factor which makes translation from Chinese to European languages particularly complicated. The observations made in the course of the analysis permit conclusions to be drawn on the linguistic worldview created by Polish, Chinese and English propria.