Der Gebrauch von Namen in Victor Klemperers LTI, Notizbuch eines Philologen (1947) und die englische Übersetzung von Martin Brady, LTI, The Language of the Third Reich (2000)

Abstract

The article sets out to discuss Victor Klemperer’s use of proper names in his documentary work LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii. Notizbuch eines Philologen (1947), which is based on his diaries on the Third Reich 1933–1945. Emphasis is placed on a set of problems facing the English translator Martin Brady (2000) in providing additional background information on a particular name for an anglophone readership. As a chronicler of the 20th century, Victor Klemperer abides by ’the principle of exactitude’ – in terms of a precise observation and detailed description of political events in time and space, and the minute recording of Nazi jargon in everyday communication. Attention is focused on the names of political and military organisation and their representatives; of institutions and their official buildings; the names of towns linked with a propaganda epithet; the names of foreign areas occuppied by German troops in World War II, and popular bynames given to Nazi leaders, including Victor Klemperer’s own onymic punning with personal names. Martin Brady, as a knowledgeable germanist and well-read in Jewish literature, applies different translation techniques in choosing functionally adequate English equivalents for the German names in their respective textual setting.