Tadeusz Piotrowski

Czech-English Dictionary. Česko-anglický slovník (review)

Roughly, we may distinguish two kinds of such philosophy. One is related to the substitution theory of translation, by which a bilingual dictionary is considered a manual of translation. According to this theory, in the process of translation lexical items in Ll text are substituted for by L2 equivalents taken from the dictionary. The advocates of this theory can sometimes produce remarkable dictionaries, thanks to rigorous methodology. That is, it is actually possible to translate in this way, and the translation is quite correct, even though more often than not it is insufficiently natural. Such a dictionary is Bogusiawskis, which had the advantage that Russian and Polish are structurally and lexically quite similar.