Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

Karel Havlíček's German family letters in Czech translations

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2014

Abstract

This paper analyzes the Czech translations of Karel Havlíček's German letters carried out by Ladislav Quis (1903) and Miroslav Novotný (1941), and the revisions made by Jaroslava Janáčková (1995) to Novotný's translation. In the introduction, the present-day situation concerning the publication of Havlíček's correspondence is outlined.

The analysis itself focuses in particular on the possible influence of the original language on the translations and the tendency to avoid such an influence. Therefore, in the theoretical parts of the individual chapters, some terminology regarding German grammar is explained.

The language resources used by individual translators are also compared with the means common at the time of translation and in Havlíček's Czech letters to determine the extent to which the respective translations display the tendency to archaize or modernize the language. The data obtained serve as a basis for determining the impression that the writer in the Czech letters and in the translations from German are the same person.