Coined by an Algonquin Round Table regular, journalist Franklin P. Adams, an "aptronym" is a name that's aptly suitable for the person who possesses it. If you naturally bear the name of one of Tolstoy's most famous characters, it seems fated that your life will be associated with literature.

Anna Kareninová lives up to her name.

The author of a clutch of radio, television and theater programs, Kareninová is best-known in the Czech Republic for her work as a translator. She is fluent in English, French, Italian and Spanish, though she complains of her lack of Portuguese.

"I also need to improve my Greek," she says.

If you are a native English, French or Italian speaker who is just learning or has mastered Czech, Kareninová's work will also be very familiar to you, as she is one of the nation's leading film translators. The Czech that flashes under many foreign films is either written or edited by her. Certainly, this includes a number of Hollywood blockbusters, though her translations seem more at home buttressing Bunuel, Fellini, Renoir, Truffaut and, currently, Almodóvar.

Born in Prague in 1954, Kareninová was the daughter of two highly cultured people. Her father, as it happens, was much like a character out of Tolstoy. Taking the family name Karenin, he was a young Ukrainian soldier in the Czar's army, who left the country after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. He became a renowned opera tenor, who toured around the world before settling in Prague. Later, he became an important music teacher, and finally married one of his students, a young woman who had always dreamt of having a daughter she could name Anna. Kareninová takes her fated christening in stride.

"I prefer Dostoyevsky," she says.

Kareninová's work as a translator began as a frustrated reader. "I read French and English classics in Czech, and I would find the work so boring," she says. "So, I learned to read in those languages, and then discovered the works' real greatness. My next step was to find a way to retranslate them into a fresh Czech that would be true to the originals."

Finding herself working at one of Prague's leading publishing houses as an editor, then translator, during the communist era, Kareninová discovered that she could moonlight as a film translator. "My first film was Italian," she remembers, "Ermanno Olmi's The Scavengers."

"It's a very, very slow process," says Kareninová on translating films. "I watch the film and take notes, then create the dialogue. After that, I make revisions again while watching the film. Finally, I read the dialogue as a text, like a play, without the film."

An interesting part of film translators' job is that they are often the ones responsible for applying the finished subtitles onto the actual film. "For the titles, I print them on paper and edit my translation again against the film," she continues. "Then I work on the timing for each subtitle with the film on my computer."

Obviously, all film translators have their own methods of rendering the spoken dialogue on the screen into their native tongues. For instance, Kareninová is against desperately hunting down Czech equivalents for French argot and Cockney slang. "I think there's a difference between translating literature and films in that regard," she states. "For a film, subtitles should not draw attention to themselves. The audience can see and hear the actors, and will intuitively understand how they are speaking. I think spoken Czech is enough. It should reveal not disturb the action on the screen."

Unlike Germans and Italians, who dub every film within their reach, Czechs are wonderfully enlightened about the process of film translation. Though most everything on television is dubbed, the cinema is fairly free of the procedure except for animated films. "I cannot stand dubbed films in the cinema," Kareninová states emphatically. "I want to hear the actors; the melody of the original speech. Dub Bergman's The Seventh Seal? I think not!"

As much as she loves film, literature remains Kareninová's first love, particularly poetry. She was married to the great Czech poet Petr Kabeš, who died last year. Throughout their marriage, she served as an editorial eye for some foreign translations of his work. "I try to help all of his translators," she says, "as my husband's poetry is quite complicated. I think it's important writing, and I think it a pity that he isn't more widely translated." She's hesitant, however, to translate Czech into one of her many other languages. "I feel that you can only translate into the language you live in," she says. "I have a physical, perhaps carnal feeling for Czech."

Kareninová is just as passionate with the literature of her language. "It's a pity that, for most people, Czech literature means only Hašek and apek," she states. "There's so much that needs to be better known, such as Jaroslav Havlíček's novels, or the poet Jiří Orten's poetry and book of notes. And Ivan 'Magor' Jirous! You can't find a literary personality like him in all of contemporary Europe."

Kareninová did try 10 years ago to start a literary magazine for Europe that would focus on translations. "I applied to the European Commission for support," she remembers, "and they couldn't even be bothered to reply. Sad. No, rude!"

As with critics, no one ever built a statue to a translator. They remain the unsung heroes of literature. Naturally, there are those who have caused greater harm than good, such as poor Constance Garnett, who often made a hash of Dostoyevsky. But then there's the work of A.W. von Schlegel, whose translations of Shakespeare convinced generations of Germans that the Bard originally wrote in Deutsch.

A good translator is one who disappears into the work, as Kareninová strives to do.