Interpreters into Russian are often heard say that proper names are to be simply given letter by letter and there is no need to bother translating them from English. It may even be seen in real life. Still, there are quite a few proper names where this rule of thumb does not work.

There are a number of expressions which are in part a kind of proper names and partially a sort of common words. Here we mean eponymic vocabulary. Before we go into this question of eponymics any further, let us look and find the meaning of the lexical unit called eponym and its variations in the science of the language. The array of all words in both English and Russian is subdivided into 2 big categories: appellatives and proper names. If you know ancient Greek, you might know that the lexical unit “eponym” means “naming” or “giving the name”. For our ancestors eponyms originally meant people,deities or great warriors, whose names were used to name villages, families and various objects, as well as governmental positions (e.g. archonts, consuls). As the time passed, the meaning of “eponym” expanded to include not only the personal name, but the name of the denoted object as well.

Nowadays the word "eponym" is more often employed with reference to regular phrases that have been singled out in a text on the basis of showing one word from the category of proper names to the category of regular words with an immediate attribution of metaphorical lexical meaning. Hence, we operate three elements of an eponym:

1. an entity or an object

2. proper name

3. regular word.

Thus, the Russian translators while working with eponymisms face the problem of developing an immediate hypothesis about the encyclopedic knowledge of users of the English text and the users of their Russian text. The connotation of eponym arises out of the etymological background. Variations among those implications in the English and Russian tongues lead to different cases of appellativization of proper names. The first important issue related to eponymisms is the matter of their out-of-context transparency which is a secret feature that relies on the linguistic competence and encyclopedic knowledge of Russian native speakers. In that case there is a question: is it okay for a Russian interpreter to think over such problems? There is no doubt about the fact that such eponymisms as lolita "a sexually attractive young girl" or a superman “a very strong, very clever and very honest man" are obviously transparent both to English and to Russian speakers so making Russian interpretation of them does not lead to any issues.

If there is no clear understanding of the connotation among the speakers from the two cultures, then again the task of an interpreter is pretty easy. (e.g.: Adonis named after a beautiful guy loved by both Aphrodite and Persephone and killed by a wild boar, or badminton that got its name from Badminton in the South West of England, country seat of the Duke of Beaufort, where people started playing it). There is a problem onlyin case if an eponym is transparent in English, but means absolutely nothing to the Russian audience. However, not every eponym causes problems. The phrases which are non-transparent, do not cause any problems to Russian speakers.