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Differences Between English and Czech Syntax in Amateur Subtitle Translation

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Differences Between English and Czech Syntax in Amateur Subtitle Translation UNIVERZITA PALACKÉHO V OLOMOUCI Pedagogická fakulta Katedra anglického jazyka GABRIELA ZAORALOVÁ 3. ročník – prezenční studium Obor: Anglický jazyk se zaměřením na vzdělávání – Výchova ke zdraví se zaměřením na vzdělávání DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ENGLISH AND CZECH SYNTAX IN AMATEUR SUBTITLE TRANSLATION Bakalářská práce Vedoucí práce: Mgr. Jana Kořínková, Ph.D. OLOMOUC 2014 Prohlašuji, že jsem bakalářskou práci vypracovala samostatně a použila jen uvedených pramenů a literatury. V Olomouci 14. 4. 2014 ……………………………………… Gabriela Zaoralová I would like to thank Mgr. Jana Kořínková, Ph.D. for all her advice, patience, support, and valuable comments on the content and style of my bachelor project. CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDMENTS CONTENTS ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 7 1 TRANSLATION AND AMATEUR SUBTITLES ...................................................... 9 1.1 Translation ............................................................................................................... 9 1.2 Amateur subtitles ................................................................................................... 11 2 SYNTAX ..................................................................................................................... 14 3 SIMPLE SENTENCE ................................................................................................ 15 3.1 Declarative sentence .............................................................................................. 15 3.2 Interrogative sentence ............................................................................................ 16 3.2.1 Yes/no questions .............................................................................................. 16 3.2.2 Alternative questions ....................................................................................... 19 3.2.3 Wh- questions .................................................................................................. 19 3.3 Imperative sentence................................................................................................ 20 3.4 Exclamatory sentence............................................................................................. 22 4 NEGATIVE SENTENCE ........................................................................................... 24 4.1 Not-negation .......................................................................................................... 25 4.2 No-negation ........................................................................................................... 26 4.3 Double negative in English .................................................................................... 27 4.4 Intensified negative ................................................................................................ 28 4.5 Scope of negation ................................................................................................... 29 4.6 Focus of negation ................................................................................................... 30 5 WORD ORDER.......................................................................................................... 32 5.1 Word order in the declarative sentence ................................................................... 32 5.2 Word order in the interrogative sentence ................................................................ 34 5.3 Sentence elements word order ................................................................................ 35 5.4 Inversion in the English sentence ........................................................................... 36 5.4.1 Subject-verb inversion ..................................................................................... 36 5.4.2 Subject-operator inversion ............................................................................... 36 6 ENGLISH COUNTERPARTS OF CZECH VERBAL AND VERBO-NOMINAL SUBJECTLESS SENTENCES ..................................................................................... 38 6.1 The verbal subjectless sentence .............................................................................. 38 6.2 The verbo-nominal subjectless sentence ................................................................. 41 CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................. 43 REFERENCES .............................................................................................................. 45 APPENDICES ............................................................................................................... 47 RÉSUMÉ ....................................................................................................................... 51 ANOTATION ................................................................................................................ 52 ABSTRACT Amateur subtitles translation is a way to improve one’s language skills. However, the problem seems to be the quality that some of the translations lack. Many translators are not familiar with individual linguistic categories where different rules are applied in every language, English and Czech included. Syntax, one of those linguistic categories, displays many differences between English and Czech language that can significantly affect the translated sentence. INTRODUCTION I have been watching English and American TV shows and movies for years. I consider it to be one of the most effective tools to improve one’s language skills. But to be able to understand the dialogs perfectly, it is helpful to watch the movies with subtitles. They can be found on official DVDs produced by professional translators. However, people are not usually willing to wait for the official release and they download the video files on the Internet instead. After these unofficial releases are uploaded, people all over the world start working on subtitles, so even those who do not speak the original language (which is mostly English) can enjoy the movie or the TV show. When it comes to the quality of Czech amateur subtitles, it has significantly improved as I have noticed over the years. When I started to get more interested in TV less than a decade ago, most subtitles were full of errors and mistakes and had no formal structure whatsoever. It was around that time when translators started to change their approach and decided to focus on quality as well. However, not all the errors and mistakes can be eliminated, especially in amateur translations. Since many translators do not study the language and translation, many of these errors and mistakes are connected to linguistics. Translators often lack the knowledge of individual linguistic categories. It is mostly intonation that causes translation problems in terms of phonetics, word classes in morphology, and mainly collocations and idioms in lexicology. And then there is syntax. Syntax is the category I decided to focus on in my bachelor project. In my opinion, syntax appears to be a very important element because there are many crucial differences between the English and Czech syntax that have a vital impact on the structure of the translated sentence. I chose to include areas that I consider the most significant. I will cover the topics of the simple sentence, the negative sentence, the word order, and the English counterparts of Czech verbal and verbo-nominal subjectless sentence. Preceding all that, a brief introduction to translation and amateur subtitles will be presented in the first chapter. I tried to collect as many ideas from grammarians as possible, however, Prof. PhDr. Libuše 7 Dušková, DrSc. seems to be one of the very few authors who specialize in differences between English and Czech syntax. Other grammarians focus either on English or Czech, which can be seen throughout this project. Individual chapters and their issues will be supported by examples that I based on actual real-life amateur subtitle translations. Each of them will be assigned an index number which represents the source that I used to supply the example. The list of them can be found at the end of the project in the Appendices. I chose subtitles of both movies and TV shows and also different types of genres to provide a wider range of various styles. All the Czech subtitles were downloaded from Titulky.com, English movie subtitles were downloaded from OpenSubtitles.org and English TV show subtitles from Addic7ed.com. There were some examples that I failed to find among available subtitles, so I had to use examples mentioned in Dušková’s Mluvnice současné angličtiny na pozadí češtiny (2006). I have been translating subtitles since I was sixteen years old and looking back I can see, as a more experienced amateur translator, that there were some major errors that I had made, and many of them were closely connected to my lack of knowledge of the syntactic differences between English and Czech. So the aim of my final project is to map those differences to show the future amateur translators what they should be paying attention to, and thus possibly help to improve the amateur subtitles scene even more. 8 1 TRANSLATION AND AMATEUR SUBTITLES 1.1 Translation The Macmillan Dictionary (2009) defines translation as “the activity of changing spoken or written words into a different language”. As Kufnerová et al. (1994) wisely point out, it is an activity that affects people’s lives every day, even
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