Orð og tunga - 01.06.2016, Qupperneq 122

112 Orð og tunga
loanwords and transcription, and grammatical treatment of foreign
proper names: should one adapt the text as much as possible for the
reader and use only a form that is familiar to him or her, or should
one also introduce foreign, “exotic” aspects, for example the original
lett ers of proper names in the transcription? Should one write Olafs-
fj ord, Ólafsfjord, or Ólafsfjörður? Is one allowed to alter the nominative
singular by omitt ing the original masculine ending, although the ba-
sic form is important, for example, for search in indexes and vocabu-
laries? Should one keep the nominative form as it is in the original
language as the basis for declension, and add an infl ectional ending
from the target language to a form which is not originally the stem of
the word (e.g. nom. Grímur, gen. Grímura)?
Rendering foreign words is only one issue in the complex set of
problems in any translation process. However, it has to be solved by
every translator, and the case of translations into Czech could well
illustrate some problems that speakers of other richly infl ected lan-
guages also encounter when they are translating Icelandic literature.
2 On the history of the Czech language
2.1 A short description of Czech
With a litt le less than 10 million native speakers, the Czech speech
community is a relatively small one. Czech belongs to the Western
branch of the Slavic language family and it has a long tradition of
literature and scholarship. The territory of the Czech language coin-
cides today with the present-day Czech Republic, but up to the end of
World War II, extensive border areas were German speaking. Accord-
ing to the 2001 census, people who declare Czech as their “mother
tongue” (the term used in the census) amount to 9,707,397, i.e., 94.9%
of the population of the Czech Republic.
Czech has a rich infl ection system (e.g., seven cases, three gen-
ders). As the syntactic relations within clauses are made explicit by
rich infl ection and extensive morphosyntactic congruence, the word
order is fairly fl exible. Word order variation renders the information
structure: the background information is usually in the front, while
the new or most important information comes towards the end of
sentences. Czech uses the Latin alphabet, augmented by three diacrit-
ics, as in the lett ers á, ř and ů.
tunga_18.indb 112 11.3.2016 14:41:17