Využití kontrastivní analýzy v kritice překladu na příkladu textů Evropské unie
Contrastive analysis in translation quality assessment: The case of EU official document translations

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the present paper is to illustrate possible strategies to assess translation quality and functional equivalence with the methods of contrastive analysis. The study is therefore related to relationships between the two autonomous, yet tightly interrelated disciplines of linguistics and translation studies, and it seeks to contribute to the discussion on whether and how translation criticism might profit from the linguistic point of view on source and target texts originating in typologically different language systems. The corpus of data consists of English and Czech versions of the European Union official documents representing specific text types that, due to hybridity of their forms and functions, address a heterogeneous group of recipients, i.e., both EU officials and the European general public. The English texts are analysed with respect to the occurrences of nominal expressions, as these are assumed to be the prominent stylistic markers of the administrative texts as well as an inherent systemic feature of the English language, and the individual instances of nominalizations are contrasted with their authentic Czech equivalents. The analysis based on the text-oriented contrastive approach aims at assessing the (non-)adequacy of possible equivalents regarding the requirements on their functionality within the selected genre.

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