English gerund and its Czech translation equivalents

The purpose of the present work was to analyse the English gerund and its Czech translation equivalents. The gerund and its translation equivalents were gathered from two parallel literary texts: Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, translated by Jiří Hanuš, and Joanne K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, translated by Vladimír Medek. For the research we used ParaConc, concordance software for multilingual parallel corpora. The resulting excerpts were then analysed from the linguistic point of view in order to provide a contrastive description of the English gerund and its Czech equivalent expressions; as a background texts were used comprehensive English and Czech grammar books. The study aimed to illuminate two related areas; namely the types of Czech translation equivalents of gerunds and the correspondence of the types of Czech translation equivalents with various syntactic functions of the gerunds. The analysis provided details about the regularities that occur in the translations of the various syntactic functions of the gerund. It was also proved that the translation of the English gerund into Czech is closely associated with the interpretation of the analytic language into the syntactic language; the confrontation of the language types may be used as background to..