"How does a country find itself 'at war' over spelling? This book focuses on a crucial juncture in the post-communist history of the Czech Republic, when an orthographic commission with a moderate ...reformist agenda found itself the focus of enormous public controversy. Delving back into history, Bermel explores the Czech nation's long tradition of intervention and its association with the purity of the language, and how in the twentieth century an ascendant linguistic school - Prague Functionalism - developed into a progressive but centralizing ideology whose power base was inextricably linked to the communist regime. Bermel looks closely at the reforms of the 1990s and the heated public reaction to them. On the part of language regulators, he examines the ideology that underlay the reforms and the tactics employed on all sides to gain linguistic authority, while in dissecting the public reaction, he looks both at conscious arguments marshaled in favor of and against reform and at the use, conscious and subconscious, of metaphors about language. Of interest to faculty and students working in the area of language, cultural studies, and history, especially that of transitional and post-communist states, this volume is also relevant for those with a more general interest in language planning and language reform."
The article deals with the genesis of Jiří Levý's monograph The Art of Translation, one of his most important works and one of the fundamental works of Czech translatology. It discusses the original ...Czech version, its different later editions, translated versions that have appeared over time, and the foreign reception of this work.
Abstract
The quality of human translation was long thought to be unattainable for computer translation systems. In this study, we present a deep-learning system, CUBBITT, which challenges this view. ...In a context-aware blind evaluation by human judges, CUBBITT significantly outperformed professional-agency English-to-Czech news translation in preserving text meaning (translation adequacy). While human translation is still rated as more fluent, CUBBITT is shown to be substantially more fluent than previous state-of-the-art systems. Moreover, most participants of a Translation Turing test struggle to distinguish CUBBITT translations from human translations. This work approaches the quality of human translation and even surpasses it in adequacy in certain circumstances.This suggests that deep learning may have the potential to replace humans in applications where conservation of meaning is the primary aim.
This paper is a conceptual supplement sui generis, the aim of which is to present a modified treatment of proper names and deproprial expressions in the Academic Dictionary of Contemporary Czech ...(ADCC). The focus of the study is both a reflection on the past and current lexicographical practice and a discussion of the key issues related to the treatment of the respective lexical subsystem in the dictionary. First, we summarize the basic facts concerning the lexicographic processing of proprial and deproprial lexical units in the field of explanatory lexicography. Second, we provide some more general information about the ADCC and, most importantly, about the macrostructure and microstructure of the dictionary in reference to the topic of the present study. We focus on the inclusion of proprial and deproprial entries in the ADCC and the specific treatment of proper names contained in phrasemes. Special attention is paid to the microstructure of proprial and deproprial entries, as well.