English and Czech it-clefts in translation: A study in Jerome

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper is a part of a research that has investigated the forms and functions of the it-cleft construction in contemporary written English and Czech, with specific focus on its FSP aspects. The research presents a contrastive study of the construction in translation, using InterCorp, a parallel translation corpus. The English it-cleft construction has been described in much detail in various publications. Rather less attention has been given to the construction in Czech; in general, it-clefts seem to be less frequent in Czech than in English, which is due to the fact that Czech, as an inflectional language, has a greater range of primary means of expressing FSP (such as word-order, focalizers, etc.). One of the goals of the present study is to compare the forms and frequencies of it-clefts in Czech translated and non-translated written texts in the comparable corpus Jerome in order to determine whether the English source sentence structure tends to influence the syntax of the resulting Czech translation.