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proportion of grammatical words, while in written language occur more lexical
words (Dontcheva-Navratilova 71).
An advantage of spoken language is the fact that the speaker gets
immediate feedback on what he says, so he/she can control that the listener
understands what he/she is saying. Common phrases the speaker uses to check the
listener's understanding are, e.g. "of course" or "as we know". Moreover, the speaker
is able to observe the listener's reactions and consequently change his speech:
"...speaker has to check to see what the attitude of the hearer is to what he is saying,
and in... how what he is saying appears to modify the hearer's attitude to the speaker.
If he observes that the hearer looks impatient or angry, the speaker may backtrack
and even contradict what he has previously said in order to re-establish a
comfortable relationship with his listener."
(Brown 272)
Henry Cecil Wyld describes how important is the ability to change one's speech
according to the situation and circumstances:
"Thus an accomplished man of the world, in reality, speaks not one but many slightly
different idioms, and passes easily and instinctively, often perhaps unknown to
himself, from one to another, according to the exigence of circumstances. The man
who does not posses, to some extent at least, this power of adjustment, is of necessity
a stranger in every company but that of one particular type."
(359)
The writer is also able to control and change his style and content but he can only do
this by a process of empathy, since there is no immediate feedback.
Concerning differences in function between spoken and written
language, the spoken variety is primarily used for purposes of social contact in face-
to-face interaction or transactional interaction, i.e. buying or selling. The written
variety is mostly aimed to make accurate records about things that have happened
and future events we do not want to forget. Thus written language is used for things
one wants to keep and remember, while information given by spoken language tends
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to be forgotten (Brown 275).
2.3 Types of talk
There are three types of talk
3
, e.g. three types of spoken interactions:
interviews, discussions and conversations. All of them have their typical features
which distinguish them from the others. The features are described briefly in the
following paragraphs.
Interviews are usually prepared for a particular purpose and placed in
a special special setting. There is an interviewer who asks questions and an
interviewee who answers them. In fact, the most interesting is what the interviewee
says; therefore, the second turn is of particular importance. Political interview or a
legal cross-examination are examples of this type of talk (Stenstörm 169).
Discussions are fairly strict, their character varies depending on what
is being discussed, who the participants are and under what circumstances the
discussion takes place (Stenstörm 169).
Conversation is "a social activity involving two or more participants
who talk about something" (Stenstörm 170). Language and strategies used in
conversations are influenced by who the speakers are, their relationships, their shared
knowledge and what they are talking about. Concerning conversations, we
distinguish two sub-types: two-party talk and multi-party talk. Two-party talk
involves two parties; both of them take an active part in conversation and mutually
cooperate. On the other hand, the multi-party talk does not require everybody in
conversation to take an active part. These talks tend to split into two (Stenstörm 170 -
171).
3 There is no general agreement on this term, so for purposes of this thesis I decided to use
terminology based on A. B. Stenstörm's An Introduction to Spoken Interaction.
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3 SPOKEN FORMS OF CZECH AND ENGLISH
This chapter aims to describe and compare features of spoken Czech
and spoken English because these are the main concern of my work and following
translation analysis. The chapter is divided into three sub-chapters, first of them is
dedicated to spoken Czech language, the second one to English. The last sub-chapter
is dedicated to chosen grammatical features of both languages, i.e. those which
frequently occur in direct speech of analysed texts and which may cause problems in
translation.
The term Spoken Czech involves Common Czech, Colloquial Czech
and of course dialects. Nevertheless, I dedicated this chapter primarily to Common
Czech, i.e. the non-literary spoken variety because it is believed to be the most
widespread means of everyday communication (Čechová et al. 43). As for Spoken
English, it involves Received Standard English as well as Regional and Class
dialects and Modified Standard (Wyld 2).
3.1 Spoken Czech
Situation of Czech language is quite different from situation of other
Slavonic languages. In other Slavonic languages (e.g. Polish), there exists a spoken
variant of the standard written language. This variant is characterized by a certain
number of special elements and prosodic features. Thus the difference between
spoken and written form is visible in differences between the prescribed standard
variety and local dialects. Nevertheless, this does not mean that speakers of a certain
dialect do not use the national standard (Čermák 27).
However, the Czech language does not correspond with this model.
There is no general agreement on how many variants (or dialects) there might be, but
without any doubt Czech speakers are dealing with at least two competing varieties
of the Czech language. Further, both of these varieties are different from each other
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