Why did they change his name to Adso?

This is an interesting discussion. I was not aware the name Adso was changed in other versions. Adson does sound like a more "Germanic" name.

I was thinking about changes in names a couple of years ago after seeing a doco about the making of Spielberg and Peter Jackson's Tin Tin movie in 2011. I had not read the works (or seen the film) but I was interested to see that the characters of Thomson and Thompson were played by two favourite comic actors of mine, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. I then learned that the character names are the English versions and that the original characters were called Dupont and Dupond.

It made me think of the Asterix characters I enjoyed as a child and discovered that some character names were changed to maintain the humourous spirit of the works. Some are changed to keep the same sense, eg Agecanonix (which according to wikipedia translates roughly as "very old age")has the same sense as the english character name Geriatrix. Oddly, the English names do not always translate the idea in the original French names, eg the druid is apparently Panoramix ("wide/far seeing") in French but Getafix (refering to his potion making)in English.The name of Obelix's dog seems to be a good translation but I wonder if an opportunity was missed and it would have worked with the original French name. He is Dogmatix in English and Idefix in Frech. Both words suggest the obsessive nature of the character and we use the term idee fixe in English. Of course there is the added cleverness in english that "dog" is co-incidently part of the word "dogmatic" even though they have different roots.

On even more of a tangent, I like the reference by brulyon to Frodo and Bilbo having different endings in the French version of Lord of the Rings. Part of the layers of Tolkien's works are that he is not writing a novel but translating the Red Book of Westmarch from the Mannish Middle Earth language of Westron (the Common Speech) into English. Tolkien has therefore imagined that he has adapted names from Westron so that they make sense in English - Suza becomes Shire, Tuk becomes Took and so on. In Appendix F, Part II of The Return of the King Tolkien states he has changed the names of Bilbo and Frodo to have more English sounding endings where "o" is a masculine ending and "a" a female one, even though "actually" the reverse is true in the "real" Westron language and they should really be Froda and Bilba.