Abstrakt
Translations of literary texts provide a rich resource for contrastive analysis of English and Czech, including ways of expressing the emphatic function in the two languages concerned. Previous analyses of literary translations from English into Czech have demonstrated the tendency of translators to copy the original ordering of the elements of structure at the expense of preserving the original sentence dynamism.
This paper focuses on the translation of means of emphatic expression from Czech into English. Here two literary works by Josef Škvorecký and by Ivan Klíma, whose books have been published in English, are analysed.
Samples of the original utterances from the two texts and their published translations into English are compared, with the focus on the employment of the highlighting syntactic structures, typical of English. For the Czech language, which is typologically different from English, the emphatic function is often expressed by lexical devices only.
The assumption is that the lexical devices used in Czech as the resource text will be strongly reflected in the target language, i.e. the syntactic devices are not expected to be frequently employed in the translation from Czech into English. The question is whether syntactic devices could be employed more effectively, so as to preserve the original sentence dynamism.