The Czech structuralist tradition and translation-related semiotic text analysis

The Czech structuralist tradition is vital to several fields of study: linguistics, literary studies, stylistics, pragmatics, semiotics, and translation studies. While in linguistics its legacy is widely acknowledged, other fields do not readily recognise it and some authors refer to it in confusing or even erroneous ways. The aims of the present study are thus twofold: – to introduce the Czech structuralist tradition as a functionalist tradition and as a formative source of the Czech and Slovak translation traditions in order to argue that it is a relevant current approach to translation, – to create a model of semiotic analysis as a tool for the analysis of (literary) source texts. Against the more general background of the academic discussions of functionalism and “pragmatics as a general functional perspective on (any aspect of) language, i.e. as an approach to language which takes into account the full complexity of its cognitive, social, and cultural (i.e. ‘meaningful’) functioning in the lives of human beings” (Verschueren 2009: 19), the study draws on the semiotic account of language as elaborated by the members of the Prague Linguistic Circle. More specifically, it focuses on the semiotics of literary texts as related to the dynamic notion of function and meaning as a unity that integrates form and content and includes the human factor of meaning-making. The paper seeks to develop the model presented in the monograph Významová výstavba literárního díla (Meaning Structure of Literary Works) by Miroslav Červenka (1992) into a tool for the analysis of (literary) source texts as a part of the cognitive process of translation and possibly the evaluation of the quality of translation, pilot testing it on examples, and briefly touching upon the notions of functional equivalence and translatability.