How could translators possibly know what is a proper noun and what isn’t in an alien language?

Weird, somehow I’ve never heard of this species or seen one in another Star Trek series. From a cursory internet search that might be because I’ve never seen Star Trek: the Animated Series.

It would be nice if the show was not afraid of killing named characters in general. Whenever someone dies it is almost exclusively a random character brought onto that episode just to die. Tasha Yar dying is more of an anomaly and never made the show feel like it had high stakes for me.