After defining what they mean by proper nouns, the authors mention some general problems raised by this category in relation to - multilingual - translation. They establish a two-level typology of proper nouns and then examine various devices, going form loan translation - which amounts to no translation - to free translation, through literal translation - not forgetting transliteration and transcription between two languages using different alphabets. They finally study some aspects of the morphology of proper nouns in relation to machine translation.