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Say we have an animal name, for example, "pufferfish", what steps could be taken to obtain its Esperanto translation?
The steps I've taken so far are:
At what point we'd better conclude "Okay, there isn't a good translation yet, let's make something up"?
When you are 100% sure there is no existing translation, do a bit of research and see how that animal is named in different language families. For example, the kingfisher is Eisvogel in German, IJsvogel in Dutch, Kungsfiskare in Swedish, Martin-pêcheur in French, Martin pescatore in Italian, and Αλκυόνη in Greek. So there are three distinct patterns:
Possible options then could be glacibirdo, reĝofiŝisto, hirundfiŝisto.
The problem is that this is very much dependent on the hearer's original language. As a German I would easily understand glacibirdo, but a Spanish person might not have a clue what that was.
So in this case the actual Esperanto translation, alciono, is related to the Greek, which is equally removed from the common names in the Western European languages, but related to the genus of the bird, and thus can pretty easily derived/understood.
I apologise for the limited selection of languages I am discussing here. I have little to no knowledge of Central and Eastern European languages, and thus no clue what eg the Polish zimorodek means (in case it can be decomposed like the above examples). Maybe competent speakers can add other languages in the comments.
More unobtrusive animals and vegetation can be named by their latin nomenclature. This is an established practice in Esperanto.
For the pufferfish which comes by many English names (blowfish, balloonfish) the family is tetraodontidae, Esperanto tetraodontedoj. So tetraodonto would be fine.
For this remarkable fish however balonfiŝo seems quite selfexplaining without ambiguity, and also recognizable in other languages.
