The paper studies the work by Andrzej Urban entitled “Pamiętnik. Nasz ród, moja rodzina i moje przy niej losy” [A Diary. Our Kind, My Family and My Life with Them], a farmer from the Podkarpacie Region who was born in Lutcza. It was published twice, in 1936 and in 2015, and not only significantly enriched Polish diary literature, but also serves as a source for recently developing research into oral history. The analysis in this article is based on the second edition of the “Diary”, which repeats the text written by the author verbatim, with all its spelling, syntactic and stylistic imperfections. It is a precious piece of material for research for not only historians and sociologists, but also for linguists.

The material basis for the article are numerous official and unofficial anthroponyms occurring in Urban’s narrative. These are authentic onyms that have mostly reference, informative and expressive functions. Their use, especially referring to generally known persons in the social micro- and macro-scale, has a positive effect on the authentication of the described events. They also characterise the author of the text indirectly, showing, for instance, his somewhat deep onymic awareness and historical knowledge.

The onymic image of the world in a translation through an intermediary language as exemplified by the anthroponyms in a collection of short stories “Baummoos pflücken” (lit. “The Lichen Collector”) by Zhang Wei.

The article addresses the issue of the linguistic image of the world — reflected in proper names — and of its translation. Chinese onyms and their related forms of address contain information about mutual relations between the speaker and the named object, thus offering a better insight into social relations in small language and cultural communities. The challenge for the translator is not only to translate these onyms, but also to preserve their social function in the text. This has been exemplified in the article by a translation of a collection of short stories from Chinese to Polish through German, where the intermediary language adds another coherence layer. The theory of the linguistic image of the world and proper names per se are a starting point for a critical analysis of this specific translation in view of the translation of onyms and of their potential for conveying the image of the world. Emphasis is placed on the transfer of the social functions of onyms into the target language. The influence of onyms and of their consistent treatment in the translation on the coherence of the studied text has also been taken into account.