Why are city and country names changed when translated into another language?

Question

For example, Roma in Italian, Rome in English. It's as if the first English speaking traveler arrived in the city and asked its name. The local replied, "Roma." And the traveler said, "Ok, I'll call it Rome." It's not like the Italian pronounciation is difficult for an English speaker. So why is there a need to change it? I understand the word "tree" is called something else in another language, but this is because "trees" are native to both lands and when the languages were developing, they both needed to call a "tree" something. So that makes sense that in two different languages, this plant has two different names. But why change the name of a country? Roma should be called Roma in all languages. Same with España, Deutschland, Česká republika, or Polska.

Answer 1

There are several reasons. One, is that city and country names are no different than loan words. When a word gets borrowed from one language to another, the pronunciation often changes from that of the donor language according to the phonetics and morphology of the receiver language.

For example, "baseball" has become beisiboru in Japanese and pesipolo in Samoan; Puerto Rican Spanish has borrowed "cornflakes', lunch box and hot dog " from American English and changed them to conflei, lonchera and jogdog; The French rendition of the German word "Sauerkraut" is choucroute. Even in English, we don't pronounce it quite the German way: "Zow-ur-krowt."

This is partly related to the fact that we learn to distinguish all of the sounds of our native language by 10 months of age. After that, the sounds of other languages like Persian gh (as in kaghaz "paper") Japanese 'r' (as in robottu "robot") or French and German uvular 'r'' (e.g. robot, Roboter) will forever sound foreign to us.

Then there is ethnocentricism and nationalism too which sometimes requires that a foreign name or word be given native pronunciation and morphological form. The Chinese are probably the biggest sticklers of this, rendering "America" into a Chinese form, Mei Guo from A-mer-i-ca but which also has the meaning of "Beautiful land" in Chinese and San Francisco becomes Jiu-Jin -San which also has the meaning of "Former Gold Mountain." An "American" is called "Mei Guo Ren" or "America person."

In English speaking countries, people with a quirky preferrence for political correctness seem to want to use native pronunciations for all nationalities and place names, even "Off-honny-stahn" for Afghanistan but it will never happen, in reality. Most people in the world are going to continue to use their native English, French Spanish or Chinese pronunciations regardless.

If there ever is a genuine international language, however, what you say may be right. It would probably be best if the international language uses, Roma, Espana, Deutschland, Cheska republika and Polska to the exclusion of any other forms as best as it can, maybe simplifying the pronunciations occasionally for the benefit of ethnic groups who have trible with western sounds like the Chinese, Japanese, Polynesians, Quechua Indians etc.

Answer 2

here is a few portuguese place names:

london=londres
new york=nova iorque
england=inglaterra
ireland=irlanda
scotland=escócia
wales=gales

One reason for the changing of the names is that the sounds of the language change. for instance, "Roma" was pronounced "Roma" in middle English, but the sound has changed, as did most of the English words.

Another reason would be to adapt the sound of the foreign word to the language, but this is uncommon in English, because the English phonology can adapt words from any language.

If the sound of a word or place is much different in English than the original, it is almost certain that it is a very old borrowing.

Answer 3

Because there are some common origins. French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian have their basics in Latin;
English and German are saxonic languages, and some words are variations of the original term, being changed only a vowel or a group of sounds or another accent.
It's the same with the country names... old villagers will always say Spain and not Espana.
It's all about the spoken language !

Answer 4

It's a normal way that peoples use to adapt a strange word to theirs. Not for countries only, but for all the strange words that we used for necessity or other reasons. I am Italian and I live near Milàno, I know that would be beautiful if strange people Would spell it like I do, but sincerely, I can't pretend that they'd twist their tongues. So, peoples simplify the words by their languages, accents, intonation and mouth ability. Example: 'r' of Roma, our 'r' is full like a Scottish or Spanish one, but a French people will pronounce it like a snoring of a cat. That, for us Italian, it comes very attractive! In the meantime 'r' doesn't exist in the Chinese language and they pronounce it 'l'; on the contrary Japanese haven't the 'l' and they pronounce it 'r'. That's funny, isn't it!? Ciao.

Answer 5

When the same language isn't spoken, words are often mistranslated. Do we have the right? Well, mistranslation isn't done on purpose. EDIT: If mistranslation was deliberate, what would be the motive? o_O Sounds like an interesting read...

Answer 6

The same reason why hello in English is Hola in Spanish and Orivjua in French. Depending upon the language you speak is how the word is said, read and wrote. DUH!

Answer 7

some names are changed so they're easier to say, but i see your point, especially as people seem to be able to say the names of smaller towns that no one's translated

Answer 8

i know, its stupid! people are so proud of their own languages that they dont want to say it in the original way. or may be they are simply ignorant.. in Lithuanian language Germany is VOKETIJA!! and Poland is LENKIJA. and they are thinking to change more names to lithuanian manner (to confuse even more tourists!!!)...