Gardziełgryz, Wyżeruch, Bebechołyk or Flakołyk? On the Polish Translation of Compounded Proper Names in Roald Dahl’s Novel The BFG (1982)

This article examines the translation strategies employed in rendering English compound proper names from Roald Dahl’s The BFG (1982) into Polish. The corpus consists of nine character names, i.e. Fleshlumpeater, Bonecruncher, Manhugger, Childchewer, Meatdripper, Gizzardgulper, Maidmasher, Bloodbottler and Butcher Boy and their thirty-six Polish counterparts drawn from four translations by Michał Kłobukowski (1991), Jerzy Łoziński (2003), Katarzyna Szczepańska-Kowalczuk (2016), and Michał Rusinek (2022). These names perform a characterising function, reflecting the characters’ physical appearance, eating habits, personality traits, and narrative roles, while their grotesque nature constitutes an essential feature of Dahl’s creative style. The analysis adopts a structural and semantic approach to translation equivalence in the rendering of proper names. Particular attention is paid to the preservation of the morphological structure of compound names, the semantic correspondence of their constituent elements, the choice of linguistic register, and the phonaesthetic effects achieved by the translators. The study also considers the differences between the English and Polish mechanisms of word formation, demonstrating how they shape translators’ decisions in the rendering of compound names. The findings suggest that the evaluation of translation equivalence in proper names should not be confined to semantic correspondence alone, but should also take into account morphological structure, semantic potential, as well as stylistic and phonaesthetic value.