LINGUISTICA PRAGENSIA 2019 (29) 2

English and Czech it-clefts in translation: A study in Jerome

Anna Kudrnová

 

 FULL TEXT  

 ABSTRACT (en)

The paper is a part of a research that has investigated the forms and functions of the it-cleft construction in contemporary written English and Czech, with specific focus on its FSP aspects. The research presents a contrastive study of the construction in translation, using InterCorp, a parallel translation corpus. The English it-cleft construction has been described in much detail in various publications. Rather less attention has been given to the construction in Czech; in general, it-clefts seem to be less frequent in Czech than in English, which is due to the fact that Czech, as an inflectional language, has a greater range of primary means of expressing FSP (such as word-order, focalizers, etc.). One of the goals of the present study is to compare the forms and frequencies of it-clefts in Czech translated and non-translated written texts in the comparable corpus Jerome in order to determine whether the English source sentence structure tends to influence the syntax of the resulting Czech translation.

 KEYWORDS (en)

it-cleft, Jerome, translated and non-translated Czech

 DOI

https://doi.org/10.14712/18059635.2019.2.1

 SOURCE CORPORA

Chlumská, L.: JEROME: jednojazyčný srovnatelný korpus pro výzkum překladové češtiny. Ústav Českého národního korpusu FF UK, Praha 2013. Available on-line: http://www.korpus.cz

Rosen, A., Vavřín, M., Zasina, A. J.: InterCorp. Institute of the Czech National Corpus, Charles University, Prague 2017. Available from: http://www.korpus.cz

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