Publications
Publication details [#19634]
Rambousek, Jiří and Jana Chamonikolasová. 2007. The existential there-construction in Czech translation. In Anderman, Gunilla and Margaret Rogers, eds. Incorporating corpora: the linguist and the translator (Translating Europe). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. pp. 133–152. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
Publication type
Article in jnl/bk
Publication language
English
Keywords
Source language
Target language
Abstract
In English, the so-called existential there has the status of a dummy subject, fulfilling a grammatical rather than semantic function. In contrast, Czech does not possess a lexical equivalent to the existential there in English; existence or occurrence is instead suggested by the intransitive character of the verb and the final position of the notional subject. For example, Bylo ticho (“was silence”) corresponds to the English “there was silence”, while Vdomě byto ticho (“In the house was silence”) would also express “There was silence in the house”. In this chapter, the authors examine English existential sentences from the perspective of translation practice. Using a corpus of parallel texts, they analyse how Czech translators deal with English there constructions and the syntactic and semantic means they use to achieve functional equivalence in Czech.
Source : G. Anderman & M. Rogers