Tradurre il tanuki : Zoonimi e fies mentali

Zoonyms are a special type of name, behaving as both proper names when denoting taxa and as common nouns when designing theirs members. As such, unlike empty names, they refer to entities having physical existence in the real word, possible objects of direct acquaintance. As it happens with place names, then, several languages may exist that refer to one and the same zoological entity by means of different words. What happens when we have to translate the name of an animal into a language in which there is no word for it? Under the mental file metaphor of the philosophy of language, I will discuss here five possible strategies for referring to the Japanese animal ‘tanuki’ in an Italian text: the loanword ‘tanuki’, the Linnean binomial gloss ‘Nyctereutes procyonoides’, the periphrastic description ‘cane procione’ (“raccoon dog”), and the two one-to-one translations ‘procione’ and ‘tasso’.