Zu den drei Leiern

13:17 Nov 29, 2010 

I've often thought there ought to be a way of giving separate points to the contributor who provides the most in the way of interesting, pertinent and amusing information on the topic, and this time it would certainly be you, Andrew, who gets the Publikumspreis! Thanks a lot for all this fascinating imput, did you reword the YouTube song yourself?
In fact only one of my 10 houses was a pub, so shall I call it "At the sign of the Willows Court"? And is Willows in the genitive?

13:08 Nov 29, 2010 

Thank you for giving all this thought to a question which turns out to be trickier than I had imagined.
Of course I didn't mean that the house "Zu den drei Leiern" doesn't exist any more, for this IS the Goethehaus or as I am now calling it "Goethe House".
Obviously if this house were to be called "Fausthaus" (as in "Buddenbrookhaus") I wouldn't translate it. But some variation on three Lyres is already common parlance in the EN texts one sees.
I meant the other 10 houses in my list which have something to do with Goethe. Luckily the names are all straightforward ( Zum goldenen Rad, zum goldenen Brunnen, zum goldenen Kopf, zum roten Männchen) with one exception ("Zum Liebeneck") and I reckon I will be able to translate them all right.
But I will now ask my client what is necessary.

12:41 Nov 29, 2010 

but how, for instance, would you go about translating the name of Thomas Mann's home in Lübeck: Buddenbrooks (http://die-luebecker-museen.de/de/1167/home2-englisch.html)

12:39 Nov 29, 2010 

the house does still stand today and I doubt it has an English translation of its name on the façade, so you risk losing tourists here!!

12:35 Nov 29, 2010 

I just think it strange and potentially difficult, since many house names could be translated, but would end up confusing, or cannot and then one ends up with lack of consistency. In the end one has to ask what purpose it serves to translate them. Your client may have asked you to do so, but that is another matter.

07:40 Nov 29, 2010 

Thank you, everyone who has contributed so far!
O.K., so as Andrew points out, I am I guilty of posing a conflated Q. with two connected parts:
a) how to translate the names of 18th century houses.
b) how to translate the names of 18th century pubs.

My text contains both, as Goethe's parental home is called "Zu den drei Leiern" and his grandparents ran an inn ("Zum Weidenhof").
Helen asks why the names of the house are being translated at all. Well, I'm just translating the text I was given, but presumably it is in case anyone looks at the German key to the map and wonders what it means. In fact I was going to put just e.g. : Goethe's parental home,"Three Lyres House". The German text will be quite near, why should I repeat it? And I don't think any of these places still exist so they won't be present-day landmarks.