Petro wrote:Cordillera Blanca is not White Mountains, Les Aiguilles Rouges are not Red Needles. Why can't Beskid Niski keep it's name too?
That's a very good question. I've seen it many times, even so may times even into French (Petites Beskides / Bas Beskid). Let's keep in mind that each Slovak name has one in Polish and opposite, except perhaps Giewont; and a wide majority has equivalents in German and Hungarian. It's not so surprising for me and Polish mountain names are not the only ones to be "translated" somehow.
Of course there is certainly a willingness from the Poles to make those names understood by others, perhaps we could say a sort of expected recognition from strangers, as Poland is often the object of bad stereotypes and poor publicity abroad concerning her beauty.
But in my opinion the main thing comes from how much a name is abstract. To understand what I mean you should put yourself in a region (in mountains, let's say a range <i>or whatever, BK</i>) where more than one language is used to spell a mountain name. As you could expect I'll take my Pyrenees to illustrate, they are perfect. We rarely translate a name from Spanish to French apart from few examples with modern words (Le Casque / El Casco, Mont Perdu / Monte Perdido, la Table des Trois Rois / Mesa de los Tres Reyes). I mean if we speak about La Collarada, it's La Collarada in French too even if we could say sth like "Collerette". But let's consider also the dialects and languages spoken in Spain. Let's move for example in the Val d'Aran where no less than 4 laguages are spoken together (Catalan, Aragonese, Aranese and French). Each place name has its translation, rather "transcription", in each. For example a peak like Mulleres has dozen of spellings and it's a mess.
Same, ask our fav Slovenes (Vid or BK) in those Friulan border regions where at least Italian, Slovene, German and Friulan are used along, with different names but often meaning the same thing.
Finally, a last point, beware of "etymology traps", or "fake friends". Les Aiguilles Rouges are not Red Needles because Rouges is not Red in this case, Claude Maugier explained it <a href="http://www.summitpost.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=52338">here</a>