Abstract
Polysemous verbs may be difficult to translate even into a closely related language. A structurally similar equivalent is often unavailable or suboptimal due to the different patterning of a given semantic field in the target language.
Czech psych verbs translated into Polish represent a case in point. Following previous studies of a number of such verbs, the focus of the contribution is on postrádat 'miss'.
Lexical entries in several monolingual, bilingual, and valency dictionaries are contrasted with concordances found in a parallel corpus, offering a colorful picture of various strategies, many of them structurally different from the original. Despite relatively low frequencies, some preferences in the choice of equivalents have been detected, namely for brak or brakować.
Interestingly, in Polish originals the equivalents of the Czech target verb postrádat are often preceded by bez 'without' or bez-, the homograph prefix. The corpus offers more equivalents if neither Czech nor Polish text is the original.
However, the results are more difficult to interpret due to the unclear status of the translation process.