This thesis discusses language corpora and their use in
translation. It describes some of
the features that corpora have, some of their uses, as well as
some of the possible
disadvantages of translators using corpora. The thesis is
inspired by a previously
conducted research, adopting its methodology. Three Czech
fiction books by Milan
Kundera, which are found in a Czech parallel corpus called
InterCorp, are chosen to be
analyzed in order to extract instances of lexical creativity.
The books are analyzed using
language corpora. A number of hapax legomena, words that only
occur once in their
respective books, is extracted, as well as a number of unusual
collocations. According
to criteria set by the original research, creative expressions
are chosen and compared
with their translations into English. The thesis attempts to
determine whether the Czech
expression were translated into English in a sufficiently
creative way. Using several
large reference corpora, such as the British National Corpus,
or the Corpus of
Contemporary American English, as well as several dictionaries
and other resources, the
researcher attempts to determine, whether the translations are
creative or normalized