Abstract
The focus of the study was the textual equivalence of selected Czech adjectives (matný, drsný, laskavý, trapný, přísný) which do not have explicit (independent of the context) equivalents in Polish. Based on the Czech-Polish section of the InterCorp, which contains the original Czech literary works and their Polish translations, all possible translations of the examined adjectives were found in the corpus.
Then the obtained translations were compared with dictionary translations. As a result, it was found that textual equivalents do not always correspond to the dictionary translation; every adjective with the highest frequency in the corpus is included in the dictionary, yet the words with the lowest frequencies are only used occasionally in translations and are sometimes even incorrect and thus not suitable for inclusion in the dictionary.
If a translation is absent, we can conclude that the given word is problematic for translator, and so rather than looking for a good translation he omits the word altogether. Through analysis of the five selected adjectives an interesting tendency in the process of translation was also observed.
The most common phenomena that occur in translation are: replacing the original parts of speech with another part of speech, changing the degree of comparison of an adjective in the positive form, and omitting the word. In addition, it was found that with the exception of přísný, as the number of hits increases, so does the number of translations of the selected adjectives.
Translations with one hit are the most common for all of the examined adjectives. Translations with the most hits have a frequency of greater than 26%.