Forest of Dean question

[zanooda2]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "geoff_bannister" <gbannister10 at ...> wrote:


> Quite frankly, if you are translating some text into 
> another language, I would leave a name like this as it is.


zanooda:

I suppose so, but this is not my call, because it's not me who does the translation, and if they decide to go with translation, I can't do anything :-). Besides, if a name includes words like "forest", both methods (translation and transcription) seem to be acceptable, I checked on the russian search engine. 

The problem with "Forest of Dean" is that in their translation it sounds as if "dean" is a person (you can tell because we have cases in our language:-)), and I say they shouldn't write it like this unless we are absolutely sure that it's true. That's why I was trying to find out what "dean" might mean here :-).