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Where to Shift Czech “vid”: Translation Strategies Applied to Czech Verbal Prefixes

Authors: Nováková Eva

Year: 2021

Type of publication: ostatní - přednáška nebo poster

Page from-to: nestránkováno

Titles:

Language	Name	Abstract	Keywords
eng	Where to Shift Czech “vid”: Translation Strategies Applied to Czech Verbal Prefixes	In morphology of Czech verbs, the aspect represents a category that combines grammatical and lexical features in a form of aspectual prefixes. Learners of Czech as the second language are usually able to comprehend aspectual opposition in the elementary imperfective–perfective verb pairs (e.g., psát–napsat, “to write”–“to have written”), but a complex lexico-grammatical character of prefixes complicates full acquisition of the elaborate system of other prefixed forms. This initiated publication of “Glossary of Czech Aspectual Prefixes for Foreigners” (Horáková, Kopečková, Nováková, and Poláchová 2021) presenting the most frequent perfective verbs in model sentences in Czech and their English translations. The present paper focuses on translation strategies applied to a language-specific category of Czech prefixes in search for their English equivalents. Contrastive analysis of the Czech source and English target texts makes it possible to list inter-linguistic similarities and differences, and to characterize the changes in form necessary to express both meaning and grammatical functions of prefixes. These translation shifts (Vinay and Darbelnet 1995 [1958], Chesterman 2016) are further classified in terms of their morpho-syntactic, lexical and pragmatic features and their quality assessed with regard to principles of functional equivalence, which are defined, among others, by a particular text type—a glossary entry limited in size and meeting L2 speakers’ communicative needs.	aspect; Czech for foreigners; corpus analysis; contrastive functional analysis; translation shifts