This diploma thesis deals with interjections in literary translation. ... interjections
and their translating strategies and connection of these translating strategies to ...
1. Introduction
This diploma thesis deals with interjections in literary translation. It compares the use of interjections in original English texts, in their translation and in original Czech texts. This theme was chosen because though interjections are quite important means of expression no attention is paid to them in linguistic or translation theory literature. And also because I was interested in what happens with interjections in the process of translation. The thesis is conceived as a corpus study because in this type of study the use of interjections in the texts and translators´ attitude to translation interjections can be manifested with the greatest clarity. For the purpose of the thesis I have chosen four English texts and their translations from the Kacenka corpus and found four original Czech texts for comparison. Kacenka (Korpus anglicko-cesky – elektronicky nastroj Katedry anglistiky) is a parallel corpus that was created at the Department of English and American Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno (www.phil.muni.cz/angl/kacenka2/). This corpus contains mainly literary texts in English and their Czech translations. In this thesis I hope to show differences or correspondences in the use of interjections in English and Czech texts, determine what the difference is and why it is there. I would also like to point out the difference and correspondence between the translators´ attitude to translation of interjections and their translating strategies and connection of these translating strategies to the Czech use of interjections. I want to find out whether there is any difference in both languages in expressing various emotions by an interjection, for example whether joy is expressed by an interjection more often in English than in Czech. This is explored in the second part of the study. The first part of the study is more theoretical. In this part the secondary literature, mainly linguistic, from which the information on interjections was derived, is introduced and evaluated and the methodology of the corpus study is described and clarified. Also the information on
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interjections gained from the secondary literature is given and classification that was adopted from the secondary literature and used in this thesis is introduced and explained. The second part of the study is the corpus study itself. To the English texts and their translations that were chosen from the Kacenka corpus Czech texts are added to form four triplets in which the interjections are looked up, classified and compared. Each triplet has its own chapter, where the tables with the occurrences and emotions expressed are given and analysis of the specific features of that particular text is offered. In the final section of the thesis the corpus study is reviewed from a more general point of view. In this section I try to determine the differences between the use of interjections in Czech and English and attempt to explain why there are differences. Here I also summarize the translators’ attitudes to translation of interjections and their translating strategies. In the concluding part of this section all the findings will be summarized and evaluated.
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1.1 Secondary Literature
Secondary literature was mainly used to get information about interjections, and also to create a list, a corpus, of interjections that were looked up in the primary literature. The most important and most comprehensive information on interjection in the Czech language can be found in works of Františel Trávníček. Trávníček (1888-1960) was a professor at the Masaryk University; his field was linguistics and Czech studies. His Neslovesné věty v češtině, díl 1. Věty interjekční, published in 1930, are a basis of the other authors´ writing on interjections and to the authors of grammars. He introduces a classification of interjections, a division to several groups; he explains the origins of those words that became interjections by a change (loss) of meaning. In his 1958 publication Nauka o slovní zásobě he discusses the communicative values and meaning of interjections in the sentence. Bohuslav Havránek in his 1981 Česká mluvnice sums up Trávníček´s findings, takes the most important information about the interjections from him and briefly defines what is an interjection. Miroslav Grepl and Petr Karlík in their Skladba spisovné češtiny, published in 1986, discuss the interjectional, vocative and exclamatory sentences and the similarities between a vocative and an interjection and the process by which a noun becomes an interjection. Two parallel diploma theses from the Faculty of Arts, Russian Studies Department, written in 1987 by Zdeňka Uhrová - Slovesa a citoslovce vyjadřující zvuky jejichž původcem je člověk - and Dana Kamenická - Slovesa a citoslovce vyjadřující zvuky, jejichž původcem je zvíře, popř. neživotná substance - give some information on the interjections, mostly derived from Trávníček´s works, and a basic list of interjections produced by humans and by animals or inanimate subjects. Information on the interjections in English can be found in many grammars but the most exhaustive is, in my opinion, in Curme´s A Grammar of the English Language. More specifically,
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in volume 2, Parts of Speech and Accidence, general definition of an interjection is given, and in volume 3, Syntax, more specific information is offered on an interjection and its position in the sentence. Vladimir. Z. Jovanovic, a Serbian scholar, gives more precise information about English interjections and also offers an extensive list of them. He discussed the meaning, position and usage of interjections. His article, “The Form, Position and Meaning of the Interjections in English”, was published in 2004 in Linguistics and Literature. Jiří Zbořil´s minor thesis from 1998, (Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Brno), Translation of Interjections, is a predecessor of this thesis; it served as an inspiration and offered some methodological solutions. From the popular Internet encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, information on interjections, on the novels and on the authors of the novels was derived. The information it gives is brief and reliable. Besides these texts a number of dictionaries was used, apart from Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and Anglicko-český, česko-anglický slovník edited by SPN, I consulted online dictionaries; those were Slovník Seznam, which offers only basic translations of interjections, and OneLook Dictionary which provide reference to the other online dictionaries, like Cambridge Dictionary (dictionary.cambridge.com). Another online dictionary that was consulted is MerriamWebster Dictionary (www.m-w.com). For inspiration and for interjections of a very recent origin (sometimes even with the author of the coinage) I looked in the Rap Dictionary (www.rapdict.org/Category:Interjections). The primary literature, the novels that were studied - Lucky Jim, Šťastný Jim, Muži v offsidu, The Cool World, Prezydent Krokadýlů, Hovno hoří, The Confederacy of Dunces, Spolčení hlupců, Černí baroni, The Jungle Book, Knihy džunglí and Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce - are introduced at the beginning of each chapter.
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I.2 An Interjection
Interjection literally means “thrown in between” from Latin “inter” (between) and “iacere” (throw). As a part of speech it belongs to the independent elements - words, phrases or clauses without any grammatical relation to the other parts of the sentence (Curme II 104). An interjection is defined as “an outcry to express pain, surprise, anger, pleasure or some other emotion […] interjections belong to the oldest forms of speech and represent the most primitive type of sentence” (Curme II 105). “Interjections are generally uninflected function words and have sometimes been seen as sentence-words, since they can replace or be replaced by a whole sentence (they are holophrastic)” (Wikipedia). Linguist consider them as phonemic clusters without any meaning which convey various messages. These messages are no longer ideas or thoughts but rather emotions, feelings and attitudes. Because of their expressiveness and simplicity they might have been the first utterances and words used by humans (Jovanovič 18). They are still useful because of “need for varied expression” (Curme 8). If they were of no use they would have been eliminated from the language. The position of the interjection in the sentence is at the beginning, in the middle, or, less frequently, at the end of the sentence, always separated by comma, forming a clause on its own. The interjections are often found as single sentences ended with an exclamation mark or a full stop.
1.2.1 English Interjection There are over 550 interjections in English, and still new ones appear, mainly as a product of pop-culture - young urban population is the most productive in creating new interjections “as a part of their unique linguistic identity” (Jovanovič 20). Pop music also creates new expressive interjections, for example rap music is really productive in this area - boo-yaa, fuckadelo - both expressions for feeling of comfort, triumph and happines (Rap Dictionary). New interjections
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come to existence either by creativity of the speaker or by borrowing from other languages (the above mentioned rap, for example, borrows from patois or Spanish). This leads some linguist to the opinion that any word can become an interjection if exclamated, expressed with force and emotion, but Jovanovič argues that a word should be considered an interjection if it is “inherent to language, the basic or natural exclamations that are produced almost involuntarily, without making an attempt at producing any value judgment” (Jovanovič 19). Jovanovič creates his own division based on the usage and meaning of interjections. The basic division is to interjections proper which are “one or two syllables segments with no particular referent in ELR (extralinguistic reality), but with indisputable purpose in language communication” (Jovanovič 20). The other group is formed by interjections which have their origins in the other parts of speech, predominantly in nouns and adjectives.
These have more word-like or phrase-like forms with identifiable referents outside language or figurative meaning and are clearly suggestive of emotional reactions to linguistic or non-linguistic stimuli [...] their repeated use in particular situational context and with corresponding prosodic features and intensity qualifies them for classification in this word class (Jovanovič 21).
Jovanovič then groups the interjections according to their “pragmatic value”. This division is probably more important for the purpose of this thesis, because of employing pragmatic equivalence in the translation of interjections. The translator only has to know in what situation that particular interjection is used. His most numerous group are “more situation oriented interjections with restricted pragmatic purpose”(Jovanovič 24). They are used in certain social situations and rituals – greetings, toasts, wishing luck, etc. The next group is formed by the
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onomatopoeic interjections. This group can grow endlessly, the only restriction is the ability of language to imitate the sounds from the natural world. The next largest group he lists is “oaths or rather mild oaths and euphemistic expressions […] used to suggest vexation, surprise or disappointment on the part of the speaker” (Jovanovič 26). Another group which is, in my opinion, culturally bound is composed of “various commands, orders or calls to domestic animals”(Jovanovič 27). I call this group culturally bound because it contains a great number of orders used during hunting, and I think that hunting is not as popular here in Czech republic as in Great Britain. The two remaining small groups are attention-seeking interjections and encouragments, mainly for sportsmen.
1.2.2 Czech Interjection Czech linguist František Trávníček devoted part of his work to interjections and divided them in several groups. He also discusses the meaning of interjections. He argued that an interjection has an ideational meaning because it communicates emotions and will (Trávníček 1958, 31). Trávníček grouped interjections as follows – subjective and objective and original and nonoriginal. The objective ones are those that immitate various sounds except sounds produced by humans. These are called onomatopoeic. Their original meaning was indicative in present or past tense. These interjections appear in children speech and are sometimes used in literature for specific purpose. Subjective interjections are those which express emotions and will of the speaker (Trávníček 1930, 11). The other distinction he makes is between the original and non-original interjection. Original (primary) interjections are partly the above mentioned, non-original or secondary interjections form a group of fossilized inflected words (various swear words), of nominal exclamation (good God) and of imperatives which lost their original meaning. Some of the interjections are borrowings from other languages - halo (French), sakra, krucifix (Latin), himl, hergot (German).
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These groupings, made by Trávníček, are based on the origin of the words. Interjections, in his view, can stand in place of various parts of speech. For example, ugh (brr in Czech) says “disgust”, “disgusting”, “it disgusts me”, thus it is in place of a noun, an adjective and a verb. Trávníček points out another interesting phenomenon and that is verbalisation of interjections, sometimes even those interjections which were originaly verbs (fossilized imperatives) are verbalised (Trávníček 1930, 219). One of the problematic groups of interjections is the group formed by empty vocatives (Bože, Kristepane, panečku, páni, marjápano). The vocative itself only serves as attention seeking and addressing word and thus has minimal communicative value and it is very similar to interjection by its position in the sentence. The line between a vocative and an interjection is very thin, the vocative tends to lose its addressing function and gets “emptied” and “inert” and becomes an interjection (Grepl, Karlík 193-195). That is why I consider these empty vocatives (Bože, božínku, páni, panečku), and their English counterparts, interjections. English dictionaries do not name them as interjections but say that they express surprise, joy or fear and they are included in Jovanovič´s exhausting list of interjections. In my opinion, there is no striking difference between what is considered interjection in English and in Czech. The features that differentiate them are more frequent occurrences in the English language and better information on them in Czech linguistic literature.
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1.3 Methodology This thesis concentrates on the translation of interjections in the literary texts and is conceived as a corpus study. Suitable texts for the corpus and for the comparison of the translation of interjections had to be chosen. Two criteria were applied to the choice of the texts. The first one was that the books that are available in the electronic form. So the English originals and their translations were retrieved form the parallel corpus available at the Department of English and American Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University in Brno. The original Czech texts were gained from the Internet, also in the electronic form. The electronic form of the novels was very important because automatic computer search was used to look the interjections up. The second criterion was the number of interjections in the texts, their frequency of appearance. Presupposing that the greatest number of interjections is found in comic novels and in literature for children, representatives of these genres were selected. From the English literature available in electronic form Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, translated by Jiří Mucha as Šťastný Jim, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces with Jaroslav Kořán´s translation Spolčení hlupců, Warren Miller’s The Cool World, translated by Josef Škvorecký as Prezydent Krokadýlů, and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book with translation by Aloys and Hana Skoumal Knihy džunglí were chosen. Because the thesis deals with the comparison of the translations with Czech original texts representatives of the same genres had to be picked from the Czech literature. The requirement here was that the novels are not very far from each other by the year of publication and that the style is at least not strikingly different. In the end these texts were chosen - Karel Poláček´s Muži v offsidu (paired with Amis’s Lucky Jim), Miroslav Švandrlík´s Černí baroni (with Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces), Petr Šabach´s Hovno hoří (with Miller’s The Cool World) and Josef Čapek´s Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce (paired with Kipling’s The Jungle Book). The English originals and their translations were found, as was said above in the Kačenka corpus, created at the Department of English and American Studies. The original Czech texts were gained from online databases of e-books www.e-kniha.webovastranka.cz and from go.to/eknihy.
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Before I started working with the selected texts I needed a preliminary list of both English and Czech interjections to have a basic idea what to start with. This list of interjections to be looked up was retrieved from a number of novels and stories and also from Jovanovic´s article and Kamenická´s and Uhrová´s diploma theses. All the electronic texts I worked with were in the doc. or rtf. format so the interjections were looked up with help of Microsoft Word processor function Find (ctrl+f). This method is reliable but the interjections cannot be looked up as whole words. This function does not distinguish between normal letters and characters like inverted commas or an exclamation mark. So it would not find an interjection at the beginning of direct speech if the box “search for whole words” is ticked. The search is slower than looking up whole words, because it will find the cluster of letters as parts of the other words, but it is more reliable. For example, if oh is looked up as a whole word in Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, the result is 24 occurrences of oh in the whole text which represents only 17% of the real number, because if oh is not looked up as a whole word the function will find 142 occurrences. This method of searching the interjections is also quite demanding in terms of one’s attention and concentration. Interjections that can be found with this method are the usual ones, the primary interjections. If there are other, unusual interjections, onomatopoeic in particular, it is better to search for clusters of the same letters (search for ooo will find booom or voooom (as in Cool World)). This method, searching only for clusters, also helps with some common interjections, like uh. If uh is written into the search box the function will find also huh, so it is useful to pay attention to the clusters of letters common to several interjections because it can save work. Compared with this method the manual searching (close reading) is more reliable. I tried to look up the interjections in the first seven chapters of Warren Miller’s The Cool World and found out that with the help of the automatic search only 80% (compared with reading) of the interjections that are in the texts was found. The interjections that were not found by the automatic search were mainly the onomatopoeic ones. The reliability of the automatic search is better (92%)
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with the interjections that are not onomatopoeic and which appear more frequently in the text. Those that appear only once or twice are found either by chance or by close reading.
Organising the interjections according to the emotions they express Having found the interjections in the texts I tried to organize them to tables according to the emotions they express and frequency of their occurrences. This helped me to compare the usage of interjections in the original texts and in the translations. At the beginning of each chapter in the corpus study there are tables with the interjections found in the texts with frequency of their occurrence. Within the chapters the interjections are organised into the tables depending on the emotions they express and on the translating method the translator employed. For classification of the interjections into the tables it was necessary to find such emotions that are more general, otherwise the classification of the interjection and their comparison would be impossible. Some of the emotions I chose are clear, like anger or fear, but it is necessary to say that these emotions might range from a mild excitement to rage or from a pleasant chill to terror and still be called anger and fear. Surprise, for example, does not stand only for a pleasant feeling but also for unpleasant surprise. In short, most of the emotions listed in the tables are summary names for a larger number of emotions, but this generalization was necessary for the purpose of this thesis. There were cases when I could not decide which emotion that particular interjection expresses. I either decided from the context or, when that did not help me to decide, listed that interjection as unspecified emotion. For example, no was one of the Czech interjections and oh one of the English that were often listed as expressing unspecified emotion.(For example “Oh, he was charmingly frank about it, James.” (Lucky Jim), or “Oh, we’ll be very serious.” (A Confederacy of Dunces, without signs of objection), or “No tak ten Ferdinand se jednou sebral a jel do Francie na práci.” (No is quite frequently used in this sense - as a part of narration), “No, a nešťastná láska se končí slavnou svatbou” (both Muži v offsidu).
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The corpus study is then summarized in the final comparison, where the overall comparison of original English, original Czech and translated texts is made as well as the comparison of the translators‘ attitudes to the interjection translation. Here I counted and compared the overall frequency of the interjections in the texts, discussed the differences between the numbers of interjections used for various emotions and summed up the most frequent interjections in the texts once more.
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2. Corpus Study
2.1 Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim, Jiří Mucha: Šťastný Jim and Karel Poláček: Muži v offsidu
These novels are both comic and both deal with a group of people with a common interest or common profession. Poláček´s novel is older than Amis´s, but the time of publication, in my opinion, does not really play role in case of these two authors. Lucky Jim was published in 1954, the Czech translation was published in 1970. It belongs to so called “university novels” (Universum I, 168). It tells a story of Jim Dixon, a history teacher at a provincial university in England. The author’s work is characterized as “satirical novels about problems of Britain being modernized” (Universum I, 168). Poláček´s Muži v offsidu was published in 1931, Poláček´s work can be described as “trying to characterize the common Czech man”, his novels range from rather mild irony to satire, which also aims at Czech men - at the middle class and their behaviour (Universum VII, 366). Muži v offsidu is a story about fans of a Prague football club Viktorka, father and son Habásko. Their comic adventures are in a way always connected with football and the other football fans. As far as interjections are concerned, there are more of them (they have greater density) in Muži v offsidu and they have a more varied use. In Muži v offsidu the most often used interjection is no, followed by jojo, jejej, etc. There are also some onomatopoeic interjections - sounds of singing, laughing. The interjections in this novel give liveliness to the characters, they partly depict their personalities (for example father Habásko´s frequent nostalgic sighs jojo), the interjections are also often used ironically. Amis in his Lucky Jim does not use any special or unusual interjections. The most frequent one was oh, which appeared alone or in phrases like oh (my) God, oh dear, etc. Other interjections which appeared often were - ah, eh, er, mm, the above mentioned phrases including God, dear
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and Christ and the onomatopoeic interjections - ha ha ha, etc. The interjections do not play as significant a role as in Muži v offsidu.
Table 1: Interjections found in Lucky Jim and Šťastný Jim Lucky Jim
Šťastný Jim
interjection
number
interjection
number
oh
155
empty vocatives
26
empty vocatives (oh God, dear) ah
33
aha
19
24
hm
4
onomatopoeic*
18
ach
4
eh
15
a jéje
1
er
6
ehm
1
mm
4
alas
2
total
263
total
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*Interjections listed as onomatopoeic were, in this case, not exactly onomatopoeic, according to Trávníček´s classification, because they are sounds produced by a human being (sounds of laughter, singing, imitating someone’s accent, etc.). But they were listed as such for the sake of easier classification. These were: hallaher hallaher, fa-la-la-la, hohoho, hahaha, bahaha, a-ah, hallo (each appearing several times).
Table 2: Interjections found in Muži v offsidu interjection no jojo empty vocatives ach... jejej nono (no, no) ó aha o jé, a jé, ó je haha hej
number 72 19 12 11 8 7 7 7 5 5 5
é hm pst núú.. nóó hip cs cs hehe hola šššš.... oj oj oj total
4 4 4 4 4 4 3 2 2 2 2 222
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Tables 1 and 2 show that the variety of interjections is greater in Muži v offsidu than in Lucky Jim. Poláček uses more interjections because the speech of his characters is more colloquial and the characters tend to be more emotive than Amis’s. The tables also show that though Amis’s use of interjections is not very varied, the translator, Jiří Mucha, uses even fewer interjections and in lesser numbers. His translation strategy will be explored next.
Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim, Jiří Mucha: Šťastný Jim
Table 3: What interjections express in Lucky Jim used to express surprise agreement understanding hesitation, thinking disagreement, objection attention seeking onomatopoeic disgust resignation beginning the sentence, addressing remembering sorrow, pity joy fear, worry anger impatience total
number 45 37 35 26 22 18 18 11 10 9 8 6 5 5 4 4 263
translated or substituted 22 13 20 13 7 9 17 9 7 0 2 4 2 5 1 4 135 (51%)
Oh Oh, as by far the most often used interjection in the text, was employed to express every possible or necessary emotion and feeling. Its use is very wide also according to the dictionaries – “oh ... expressing surprise, fear, joy, etc....used for emphasis or to attract sb´s attention” (Oxford
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Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 858). In the text oh is most often used to express agreement, surprise, disagreement or objection, and hesitation (see table 5). Oh often appeared as oh yes, oh no, as an expression of agreement or remembering or objection and are dealt with as single interjections. Oh also appeared as a part of address (“oh, Dixon”), these were dealt with as attention seeking interjections. Phrases with oh that were separated are oh dear, oh God, oh my goodness, etc. I consider these different interjections than oh. In Czech grammars these phrases are classified as “empty vocatives” (Grepl-Karlík, Trávníček), words that used to be nouns but their meaning got lost, and oh (ó) is very often used as a part of a vocative in English literary texts. Mucha in his translation avoids using equivalents for oh (ach, ó) and prefers to omit it altogether or to use a different part of speech or a different interjection (mainly aha) instead of it. He uses an equivalent only in three cases, once as a sigh (“ach Jime”) and twice in a phrase expressing remembering or realisation (“ach tak”). In other cases Mucha uses another interjection (aha), a different part of speech or a different method of translation - for example instead of emphasizing oh in “oh, no” he puts “ne, ne”, doubles the negation and emphasizes it as well. Generally speaking, Mucha prefers to use the part of speech that oh stands for. For example he uses verb in “oh, Dixon”- “poslyšte, Dixone”, etc.
Table 4: Methods of translating oh in Lucky Jim by Jiří Mucha method of translation
number
equivalent other interjection other part of speech omission total number
3 22 37 93 155
% of the total 2% 14% 24% 60%
ach, aha, a jéje, Bože poslyšte, kdepak, tak,
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Table 5: What oh expresses in Lucky Jim used to express agreement surprise understanding disagreement, objection hesitation, thinkinng attention seeking resignation remembering sorrow, pity joy total
number 30 28 27 19 18 13 10 8 1 1 155
% of the total 19% 18% 17% 12% 12% 8% 6% 5% 1% 1%
translated or substituted 23% (7) 46 % (13) 55% (15) 32% (12) 44% (8) 7% (1) 30% (3) 25% (2) 100% (1) 0% (0)
This table shows how frequently oh was used to express the emotions listed in the table. The first percentage is worked out from the total number of occurrences oh (155). The numbers in the third column show the percentage worked out from the number of occurrences of oh expressing one emotion and the number of translated or substituted cases (for example 7/30 in the first line).
Phrases oh (my) God, my God, God These phrases are usually used in to express fear, joy, disgust or anger. I deal with these phrases separately also because Mucha employs a completely different strategy in translating them. He prefers to use equivalents or approximate equivalents; he does not translate my God as “můj Bože” but with empty vocatives like proboha, panebože, kristepane. Mucha also uses these empty vocatives to translate other interjections like oh dear, dear dear, for which Czech does not have any “direct” equivalents. (As a probable deviated or abbreviated form of “dear God” it could be translated by some of Czech deviated forms of vocatives like jemine, jemináčku, krindapána, etc. but these would hardly be convenient for the text.) Similar interjections like Christ, my Goodness and the already mentioned dear are translated by the same method. Mucha uses different, sometimes deviated, forms of empty vocatives/interjections like “bože, proboha, prokrista”.
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These interjections express mainly fear (5), disgust (8), impatience (4), surprise (6), anger (2), hesitation (2), joy, agreement, resignation and objection (each once).
Table 6: Methods of translating (oh) (my) God, (oh) dear, Christ, etc. in Lucky Jim by Jiří Mucha method of translation equivalent other interjection
number
% of the total
20 7
61% 21%
other parts of speech
3
9%
omission total number
3 33
9%
not exact equivalents proboha (christ), bože bože (dear), etc. ale, ale, ani za nic, samozřejmě, na mou duši
Ah This interjection has a more limited use than oh. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary says that it expresses “surprise, delight, admiration, sympathy, etc.”(24). Ah thus expresses more positive and pleasant emotions and feelings than oh. Amis uses this interjection to express surprise and understanding, less frequently for joy and consent or agreement. Ah appears usually together with “there” or “here” (“ah, there you are”) and again with names. Ah usually expresses surprise, agreement, understanding and joy. Mucha employs the same translating strategy as with oh and prefers to omit it, he uses the equivalent only once (ach), which is none of the possibilities the bilingual dictionary offers (it gives “á, och, ó”) (Krámský et al. 27). Again the choice is quite understandable; ach is better suited for this type of text than och or ó. Sometimes he chooses another interjection, namely aha instead of ah. When he uses different parts of speech he translates ah by “jo”, “ano”, or by a word ah stands for, like “poslyšte”.
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Table 7: Methods of translating ah in Lucky Jim by Jiří Mucha method of translation equivalent other int. other part of speech omission total number
number 1 2 6 15 24
% of the total number 4% 8% 25% 63%
ach aha ano, jo, verbs
Table 8: What ah expresses in Lucky Jim used to express
number
surprise agreement understanding joy anger attention seeking disagreement pity, sorrow
7 5 3 3 1 1 2 2
% of the total number 29% 21% 12,5% 12,5% 4% 4% 8% 8%
translated or substituted 29% (2) 60% (3) 33% (1) 33% (1) 0% (0) 100% (1) 0% (0) 50% (1)
Eh This interjection is “used to express surprise or doubt, to invite agreement, or to ask for sth to be repeated” (OALD 387). The same use it has in Lucky Jim. Eh usually appears at the end of an interrogative sentence and “invites agreement” as the dictionary puts it. The translator again does not use any interjection, but functionally similar words like “co, cože, viďte” or omits it. There are no equivalents. Mucha uses other parts of speech in 10 cases and omission in 5 cases.
Er The same translating strategy is used with er, which expresses hesitation and appears six times in the text. Mucha uses different part of speech (4) “jakž takž, všelijaké, totiž...” or omits it altogether (2).
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The last remaining interjection is mm, which expresses thinking, hesitating or agreement. It appears at the beginning of the sentences (4) and in all cases Mucha translates it with an equivalent as hm.
There is another group of interjections which, I think, do not express any emotions but sounds, but I would not call them onomatopoeic. They imitate sound of laughter (ho ho ho, ma ha ha), singing (fa-la-la-la...) and then there is hallo, hallaher (used when phoning). All these interjections are either transferred (ho ho ho) or translated with exact equivalent (tra-la-la, ha ha ha, haló). To sum this overview up, I would say that Jiří Mucha translated those interjections that have approximately the same frequency in Czech as in English (God, Christ, etc). Those that are not used so often he usually omitted or substituted with other interjections or parts of speech.
Karel Poláček: Muži v offsidu As was said above, Poláček uses more interjections (not in numbers but in proportion) in the text than Amis and their use is more varied and livelier. The most often appearing one is no. Some people may argue that no is not an interjection but the use of it suggests that it should be considered an interjection, for example because, as an interjection, it can be removed from the sentence and no change will happen with the meaning or syntax of the sentence. Czech no as an interjection will be written in italics as the other interjections are and so it will be easily distinguishable from English “no” as negation, as all the other parts of speech it will appear in inverted comas. Another interjection which I decided to list even though some scholars may say that it is not an interjection is jojo. “Jo” as such is a colloquial expression of agreement but it appears also as an expression of joy and pleasure and when it is doubled it expresses right the opposite - sorrow, pity or melancholy. This way it works in Muži v ofsajdu where it is used 16 times. The other interjections which are to be found in the text are, in my opinion, indisputable.
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Interjections that were found in Muži v offsidu, those that appear more than once, are in the table in the beginning of this chapter. There are other interjections which appear only once or which are onomatopoeic - hahá, bohorodičko, ejchuchu, ouvejs, ajajaj, hihihi, chichichi, ochochocho, o, mankote, prr, fuj fuj, hurá, mtadadádá mtádadádá, la-la-la, houk, tradá, tfiú, vauvauvau, kristapána. The interjections used in the novel are very often part of a person´s speech, they form a part of character´s idiolect (jojo used by one, ach used by women characters).
Table 9: What interjections express in Muži v offsidu used to express
number
sorrow, pity anger disagreement hesitation, thinking attention seeking unspecified emotion invitation joy fear contempt surprise worry understanding agreement encouragement total (with other interjections)
41 23 21 17 16 12 12 12 9 8 6 6 5 5 5 222
% of the total number of int. (222) 18% 10% 9% 8% 7% 5% 5% 5% 4% 4% 3% 3% 2% 2% 2%
Usage of no in Muži v offsidu Poláček uses no to express almost every emotion and feeling necessary, sometimes also uses it only as a beginning, an introductory word which has no other meaning, no other message, sometimes as a part of an address. Sometimes it was difficult to decide what exactly no expresses in the novel, but that is a problem with many other interjections, the process of deciding is described in chapter on methodology.
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Table 10: What no expresses in Muži v offsidu used to express anger sorrow, pity agreement disagreement hesitating, thinking invitation unspecified emotion other uses total number
number 10 6 4 12 10 12 12 5 72
% of the total 14% 8% 6% 17% 14% 17% 16% 7%
% of other int. expressing the same 50% 18% 80% 57% 59% 100% 100%
Ach, ó Ó appears in prayer, as a part of “ó Bože” (oh God) and as an expression of surprise or joy but that only in two cases. Ach is used in addressing either God or other characters (Richarde), and once or twice in a nostalgic sigh - “ach, ta láska” (oh, that love).
Bože and other empty vocatives Bože, kristapána, bohorodičko, ježíšmarjá, ježíš and panenko milostná were used as exclamations expressing various emotions - sorrow, fear, joy, worries. Those that were in the text as part of a prayer were not included. I do not consider these vocatives empty but real nouns (these have addressing and naming function). Having explored the texts separately I would like to compare them now in terms of frequency of the use and occurrence of interjections.
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Comparison Table 11: What interjections express in Lucky Jim, Šťastný Jim and Muži v offsidu used to express surprise agreement understanding hesitation, thinking disagreement attention seeking contempt, disgust resignation remembering sorrow, pity fear joy anger total
Lucky Jim 45 37 35 26 22 18 11 10 8 6 5 5 4 263
Šťastný Jim (only int.) 10 3 15 3 1 0 7 5 2 2 4 2 1 55
Muži v offsidu 7 6 4 19 27 16 8 0 1 41 5 12 21 222
From table 11 the translator’s tendency to fit the usage of interjections to Czech standards can be seen and also his strategy to avoid using interjections in translation even though Czech uses them in a given situation. For example, joy, anger or sorrow is expressed by an interjection quite often, as table 11 shows. Avoiding interjections may lead to reduction of the colour, the style and the variety of expression of the original. Mucha partly compensates for this by using Czech interjections when translating other words and phrases - “I see” is translated by aha, intensifiers like “what on earth”, “what the hell” or “for God’s sake” he translates by kruci and proboha (see table 12 below). By adding these interjections Mucha compensates for reduction of interjections that express understanding or agreement (aha) and hesitation (no). He adds interjections expressing anger by translating intensifiers by interjections.
Table 12: Translation of interjections by Jiří Mucha in Lucky Jim Lucky Jim - Šťastný Jim interjection - interjection interjection - no interjection no interjection - interjection
numbe r 55 208 33
% of the total in the source text (263) 21% 79% 13%
aha (10), proboha (11), no (11), kruci (1)
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Table 12 sums up Mucha´s use of interjections. It shows how many interjections were translated, omitted and added in his translation. His dealing with interjections is very interesting: he translated 21% of the interjections from the source text and added more than half of the number of the translated ones. Even with the added interjections his translation has the fewest interjections of the texts explored here.
Oh and no These interjections appear most often in Lucky Jim and Muži v offsidu. Oh is used 155 times in Lucky Jim, no is used 72 times in Muži v offsidu. Mucha translates oh by its equivalents only three times, and uses other interjections only 22 times. On the other hand he uses no only 12 times in the whole novel, only once as a translation of an interjection (ooh), the other instances are usually translations of “well”, “anyway”, “anyhow”. Jiří Zbořil in his minor thesis found out that no is used to translate oh quite often, especially when it expresses hesitation or agreement. Mucha does not adopt this strategy; he prefers omission, other parts of speech or other interjections. In Muži v offsidu equivalents of oh, ach and ó appear 11 and 7 times, respectively. They are part of an address or a prayer; sometimes they express surprise, agreement or disagreement. It is difficult to compare it with three instances of ach in Šťastný Jim, with no case ó in the text, but it seems that Mucha was right to avoid exact equivalents, the more so when we realize that some of the achs and ós in Muži v offsidu are used ironically.
Aha This interjection appears only 7 times in Muži v offsidu, but Mucha uses this interjection very often; as was said above he uses it when translating oh, ah, “I see”, making it the most frequent interjection in his translation (33 cases) which is unusual and may seem unnatural because in originally Czech texts these rarely appear more than ten times (for example, once in Šabach´s Hovno hoří and Švadrlík´s Černí baroni, 5 times in Čapek´s Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce).
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2.2 John Kennedy Toole: A Confederacy of Dunces, Jaroslav Kořán: Spolčení hlupců and Miroslav Švandrlík: Černí baroni
These two novels are both comic, they are closer to each other by time of both writing and publication than Poláček´s and Amis’s novels. Toole’s novel A Confederacy of Dunces was published in 1980, but it was written in 1969. Švandrlík´s Černí baroni was published in 1990 though he started writing it in 1962. They also share a critique of society hidden under the comic tone. A Confederacy of Dunces takes place in 1960s in New Orleans and tells a story about a lazy but intelligent college graduate Ignatius Reilly and his adventures during his search for work, and about people from the back quarters of New Orleans. Švandrlík´s Černí baroni takes place in 1950s in the army, in one of the “working” battalions for those not fulfilling the regime’s ideas about true communist soldiers (priests, gentry, rich farmers together with thieves and criminals and reliable communists who are not able-bodied). As far as interjections are concerned, Toole´s novel has a greater number and variety of them, ranging from the classic ones (oh) to dialect or idiolect ones (Jones’s whoa). One of the most frequent ones is again oh; alone or in phrases like oh Lord, oh my God. There are also vulgar interjections (shit). The interjections in this novel have a similar function to the interjections in Poláček´s Muži v offsidu. The interjections in A Confederacy of Dunces also form an important part of a dialogue; they help to create a feeling of a real, lively, colloquial speech of common people and sometimes also help to characterize the personalities of the heroes of the novel. Švandrlík in Černí baroni uses fewer interjections, usually rather vulgar, sometimes not only Czech ones but also Slovak ones (or rather Czechoslovak, coined by major Terazky). Again there is a great number of empty vocatives (ježišmarjá). The small number of interjections in the text is caused by the ironic, elevated style of the novel and by the less important role of the dialogue in the novel.
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Table 13: Interjections found in A Confederacy of Dunces and Spolčení hlupců A Confederacy of Dunces oh empty vocatives hey whoa aw huh ooo wee onomatopoeic* shit ho hum whoo aha uh huh
number
Spolčení hlupců
number
147 122 77 73 38 34 25 21 16 7 5 1 1
empty vocatives 123 kurva 83 ach 75 aj vaj (varied) 27 onomatopoeic 21 hej 18 no 17 doprdele 12 achich 7 aha 4 ó 4 žú 2 ouvej 2 hovno 2 au, jauva 1 eh, ech 1 uhm, huhmmmm 1 páni 1 juchúúú 1 halo 1 a jeje 1 total 560 total 404 *Onomatopoeic interjections are: hoho, ho hum, aarf, braah, woof woof woof, oof, whoo, shh (each appearing several times).
Table 14: Interjections found in Černí baroni interjection no sakra proboha boha jeho doprdele bože môj hm ježíšmarjá he jo, jo (jó) fuj ha ajajaj hergot once appearing total
number 87 12 8 7 6 5 5 5 3 3 3 2 2 2 25 175
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Tables 13 and 14 show the difference between the original novels, the density of interjections in Černí baroni is smaller, the interjections in the text form only 0,150% of all words, compared with 0,429% in A Confederacy of Dunces. As was said above, interjections do not play as important a role in Černí baroni as in A Confederacy of Dunces. They are used only to make the dialogue more natural. Table 14 shows that Švandrlík employs almost none of the primary interjections in his novel, which suggests that his characters are not as emotive or emotively acting as Toole´s and that Švandrlík uses other methods to express the characters´ emotions (ironically serious utterances). Table 13 also shows Kořán´s creative attitude to translation of interjections. His methods will be explored below.
John Kennedy Toole: A Confederacy of Dunces, Jaroslav Kořán: Spolčení hlupců
Table 15: What interjections express in A Confederacy of Dunces used to express anger disagreement, objection surprise address, att. seeking joy sorrow, pity fear inviting agreement excitement onomatopoeic agreement disgust remembering pain understanding emphasis misunderstanding resignation unspecified emotion hesitation, thinking total
number 111 63 62 47 39 33 31 29 25 21 18 17 14 14 12 10 5 4 4 1 560
translated or substituted 99 45 60 40 38 31 27 21 24 21 13 17 13 14 12 9 5 4 3 1 497
88,75%
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Oh Oh is again the most often used interjection. Oh is not used for any particular emotion but is quite evenly distributed among more of them (see table 17). Oh appears 142 times in the text. Though Kořán prefers translating interjections to omitting them, with oh he uses omission frequently, almost for quarter of the ohs (see table 16). To translate oh he employs direct equivalents (ach, ó, och), sometimes mocking the emotion with achich. Achich is also sometimes used to translate oh uttered by the homosexual character in the novel. Kořán uses other interjections less frequently, for example sakra, žú, no. Sometimes he also translates oh by other parts of speech, like “ale”, “jen”, “tak”. Oh again appears as a part of phrases like oh my God, oh dear, etc. I will deal with these phrases separately again because of the reasons given in the previous chapter and because of the great variety of expressions Kořán used to translate them.
Table 16: Methods of translating oh in A Confederacy of Dunces by Jaroslav Kořán method of translation equivalent other interjection other parts of speech omission total number
number
% of the total
83 13 12 34 142
58 9 8 24
ach, ó, och žú, sakra, no tak, ale
Table 17: What oh expresses in A Confederacy of Dunces used to express objection joy anger surprise remembering address understanding fear agreement sorrow, pity unspecified emotion pain
number 21 18 17 15 14 14 12 10 8 7 4 2
% of the total number 15% 13% 12% 11% 10% 10% 8% 7% 6% 5% 3% 1%
translated or substituted 52% (11) 100% (18) 35% (6) 93% (14) 93% (13) 86% (12) 100% (12) 60% (6) 50% (4) 100% (7) 75% (3) 100% (2)
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(First percentage worked out from the total number of oh in the text, the second from the particular emotion, for example 11/21 in the first line) Sometimes the boundaries between feelings and emotions are not clear and it is a question of personal choice or personal interpretation to which column the interjection will be added. For example “oh, my valve” can be seen as expressing fear, pain or anger. I listed it as fear.
Whoa This interjection is used mainly by Jones, the black vagrant, the only one who seems to see things clearly and who has the tendency to comment on things using rather vulgar expressions. This one is problematic. The dictionaries I consulted offer two possibilities - “command to a horse to stop or stand still” or “request to a person to slow down speaking or acting” (OALD 1458, dictionary.cambridge.org). From the translator’s attitude to this word (72 times translated as kurva and once omitted) it seems that he sees it as mispronounced “whore”, or that he translates this interjection which is used without any specific meaning with regard to the character that uses it and translates it with a vulgar word. The use of this interjection (table 18) shows that Kořán´s interpretation of this word was right.
Table 18: What whoa expresses in A Confederacy of Dunces used to express anger excitement surprise joy agreement sorrow, pity total
number 31 25 8 5 3 1 73
% of the total 42% 34% 11% 7% 4% 1%
translated 100% (31) 96% (24) 100% (8) 100% (5) 100% (3) 100% (1)
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Ooo-wee Discussing the character of Jones I will continue with his other favourite interjection and that is ooo-wee. This interjection is used to express sorrow, pity (10), surprise (6), anger (5), emphasis (4), joy (1) and is translated either by aj-vaj (jaj-vaj), sometimes varied in the number of syllables, or by aj-jaj, oj-oj, again varying in the number of syllables.
Empty vocatives - Lord, Christ, my God, etc. Toole employs a great number of empty vocatives in his novel. It is probably caused by the chattiness of the characters and by the effort to make the dialogue as vivid as possible. The most numerous interjection in this group is oh, my God (44 occurrences) translated as ach Bože in 43 cases and once as panebože. None was omitted. In A Confederacy of Dunces oh, my God expresses these emotions: anger (16), disgust (9), fear (8), pain (5), surprise (3), disagreement (2) and joy (1). This phrase has a fixed translation, fixed equivalent, which cannot be said about the other phrases:
Table 19: Translations of the empty vocatives in A Confederacy of Dunces oh (my) dear oh my God (oh) Lord
oh (my) goodness oh (my, good) heavens good grief oh, my good God my God Christ Jesus Christ, Christ awmight
božíčku, ach jejda jémine, jemináčku (3), jémine (2), propána ach Bože (43), panebože (1) božíčku, bože božíčku, prokristáčka (2), mankote (7), ale děte, ó pane, můj ty bože, pánbíčku an nebi, dobrotivý bože, panebože (2), krindapána (2), prokrindáčka,, ježíšku na křížku, šmarjá, ach ta má hlava, ach propánajána, ach má ty dobroto, ach jouvej, ježíšmarjá, ach bože na nebi, ach můj ty bože, achich jémine panenko skákavá, pro Kristovy rány, ach probůh, jémine, dobrotivá nebesa (6), spravedlivá nebesa panenko skákavá, pro pět ran božích, můj ty smutku (6), ach božíčku, jemináčku dobrotivý bože probůh, bože (4), můj ty bože, můj ty smutku kristepane (3), Ježíši Kriste Ježíši Kriste (3)
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The variety of expression in the translation is great as is manifested in table 19. There is no special use of any of these interjections for particular emotions in the original or the translation. Kořán in his translation uses many of deviated forms of Jesus Christ (jémináčku, jémine, krindapána, prokristáčka), of God (propána, Czech Pán Bůh), of German for my God (mankote, mein Gott) and once of Virgin Mary (šmarjá, from Ježíš Maria).
Table 20: What the empty vocatives express in A Confederacy of Dunces used to express surprise
number 23
anger fear disgust objection, disagreement sorrow, pity joy pain resignation remembering emphasis total
14 13 8 7 5 5 4 1 1 1 82
examples (oh) Lord, oh my, oh dear, oh heavens, oh my goodness... oh dear, good grief, oh my goodness, my God... Lord, oh dear, good heavens, Christ my God, good God, oh my heavens good grief, (oh) Lord Lord, oh my goodness oh my dear, Lord, oh my goodness good grief, oh Lord oh my dear oh my Lord
Tables 19 and 20 are organized differently than the other tables because I want to show the translator’s creativity in translating this group of interjections.
Aw This interjection expresses “mild disappointment, gentle entreaty, or real or mock sympathy or sentiment” (www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary, Merriam-Webster Dictionary). In the novel it is used as an expression of objection, sorrow and pity, joy and agreement. It is usually translated by “ale” (“aw, come on” - “ale děte”, “aw, Santa” - “ale di ty, Santo”) or by other interjections like no (see table 21). It is quite difficult to find out which of the Czech interjections could be used as an equivalent for this word, I would suggest probably ó, ach - equivalents of oh. Table 22 shows
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that Kořán did not prefer equivalents but other parts of speech which are in these situations used in Czech.
Table 21: Methods of translating aw in A Confederacy of Dunces by Jaroslav Kořán method of translation equivalent omission other interjection other parts of speech total
number 1 7 11 19 38
% of the total 3% 18% 29% 50%
ach no, eh, ech ale, heleďte, jo
Table 22: What aw expresses in A Confederacy of Dunces used to express objection, disagreement sorrow, pity joy agreement
number 23 8 4 3
% of the total 60% 21% 11% 8%
translated or substituted 83% (19) 75% (6) 75% (3) 100% (3)
Hey
According to the dictionary, this interjection is “used to call attention or express surprise or inquiry” (OALD 585). In the novel it is used to attract attention in a great majority, but it also expresses anger, objection or surprise. This interjection is translated by its equivalent (hej), by other interjections (no, a jeje, aj-vaj, kurva) and by other parts of speech: verbs - “počkejte”, “heleďte”, nouns - “darebáci” (“‘Hey!’ he heard Santa Battaglia shout”,“‘Darebáci!’slyšel křičet Santu...”), “hochu” (“hey, boy” - “hochu, hochu”) and other: “cože”, “kamto”, “ahoj”, “zdravíčko”, “tak to prrr” (“‘Erran? Hey! I thought this a sweepin and moppin job.”’ “‘Pochůzku? Tak to prr! Já jsem najatej na zametání.”’).
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Table 23: Methods of translating hey in A Confederacy of Dunces by Jaroslav Kořán method of translation equivalent other interjection other part of speech omission total
number
% of the total
19 28 18 12 77
25% 36% 23% 16%
hej jauva, kurva, hergot, no kamto, heleďte, co je, cože, darebáci
Table 24: What hey expresses in A Confederacy of Dunces used to express
number
% of the total
attracting attention anger objection surprise agreement sorrow, pity joy greeting
33 18 9 6 3 3 3 2
43% 23% 12% 8% 4% 4% 4% 3%
translated or substituted 85% (28) 94% (17) 56% (5) 83% (5) 67% (2) 100% (3) 100% (3) 100% (2)
Tables 23 and 24 show that Kořán again translated hey according to the emotion it is used for. Hey in this novel has much wider use than the dictionary suggests and Kořán, in reaction to this, uses many interjections and also other parts of speech to translate it.
The remaining interjections that appear more frequently are huh, shit, whoo and ouch. On the whole, Kořán uses a greater variety of interjections to translate them, he tries to use those interjections that expresses these emotions in Czech. Huh is, according to the dictionary, “used to express scorn, disgust, enquiry, etc.” (OALD 607). In the novel huh is used to invite agreement or as an expression of enquiry. It is also translated as such. Kořán uses the other parts of speech to translate it. When huh invites agreement (29 cases), it is translated as “co”, “viď”, words that invite agreement in Czech (21 cases). Huh also expresses misunderstanding (5 times) and is translated as “cože”or “prosím”.
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Shit is a word used mainly to express anger and is translated as doprdele or kurva. Shit is also twice expresses objection, in those cases Kořán translates shit as “pěkný hovno”, which is equivalent of shit and which is also used in Czech to express objection. Whoo “is an expression of delight” (www.onelook.com). In the novel it expresses mostly positive emotions. It appears 5 times and each time is translated differently. When it expresses joy it is translated as juchúúú and žúúú, when it is used to express surprise it is translated as páni, resignation is expressed by hergot and objection by chacha. Also ouch gets different treatment every time it appears, it is translated as ouch, auvaj, auu. The interjections that are left are onomatopoeic or have mixed usage, like ho hum which express sorrow (ach ouvej), anger (hoho), objection (hoho), or imitates yawning (huáááá) twice and once unindetifiable sound (áááhumm). The others are onomatopoeic - woof woof arf for dog´s barking, oof for fall, braah, aarff, hoho, ssh.
Miroslav Švandrlík: Černí baroni The most numerous interjection in this novel is again, as in Muži v offsidu, no. It is followed by empty vocatives like sakra, proboha, boha jeho. I did not include commands (halt), these could be considered interjections because commands to animals are interjections (Jovanovic), but I think that these are not important for the purpose of this thesis, even if they were interjections, because their use is very specific and limited. Interjections that appear in the novel are listed in table 14 at the beginning of this chapter. Those that appear only once were - hej, eh, prisámboh, aha, ej, nu, prokristapána, ach, bašta, haló, prima, ježíši kriste, kruciprdel, pane bože, urá. There are also onomatopoeic interjections hu ha ha urá urá urá, ha ha ha ura ura ura, la-la-la, lala, la la la, jupajdis jupajda (all refrains of songs), aaaa....oh....jajaja, búúú....kak....ááá, éééé...jujuju...huhuhu, hau jeje ááá (babbling of one of the soldiers).
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Table 25: What interjections express in Černí baroni used to express anger unspecified emotion hesitation, thinking agreement joy fear sorrow, pity surprise disagreement, objection disgust understanding invitation resignation impatience misunderstanding attracting attention total
number 28 26 18 18 14 13 10 6 5 5 4 4 4 2 2 1 175
% of the total number (175) 16% 15% 10% 10% 8% 7% 6% 3% 3% 3% 2% 2% 2% 1% 1% 1%
No No is the most frequent interjection in the text. It often appears as an uncertain, unidentifiable expression, for example, “No, nad tím by se snad dalo přimhouřit oko” or “No, já tě k tomu nutit nebudu”. These occurrences are difficult to decide and are listed as unspecified emotion. Sometimes context helps to decide the emotion the interjection expresses but not in all cases. (for example “‘No vidíte,’ radoval se Troník” was listed as joy).
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Table 26: What no expresses in Černí baroni used to express
number
unspecified emotion, address agreement hesitation, thinking joy anger disagreement, objection invitation surprise fear impatience understanding sorrow, pity disgust resignation total
25 16 13 7 5 4 4 3 2 2 2 2 1 1 87
% of the total ( 87) 29%
% among other int. expressing the same 89%
18% 15% 8% 6% 5% 5% 3% 2% 2% 2% 2% 1% 1%
89% 72% 50% 19% 80% 100% 50% 15% 100% 50% 20% 20% 25%
Sakra and other empty vocatives Sakra is also an empty vocative, this time from Latin “sacra(mentum)” it probably has its origin in sacred rituals or oaths and sakra is altered, deviated because of the taboo (Holub-Lyer 430). Today this meaning is completely lost, by contrast, it is considered quite rude. Sakra appears mostly as an expression of anger (11 cases, to this number was counted two instances of k sakru, inflection of sakra) and once it expresses sorrow and pity. Proboha is used 8 times, mostly for fear (4 cases), then for anger (2) and once for disgust and surprise. Boha jeho is quite specific for this novel, it is a Slovak interjections but characters speaking Czech use it as well (probably after major Terazky). It appears 7 times in the novel and expresses anger (2 cases), disgust (2), joy (1), fear (1) and sorrow, pity (1). Bože moj is used by the character of major Terazky, who speaks a strange mixture of languages which resembles Slovak. It is used 4 times for sorrow, pity (2), anger (2) and joy (1).
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Ježíšmarjá is written with varied diacritic (jéžišmarjá, ježišmarjá). It appears 5 times and expresses fear (4 cases) and sorrow, pity (1). Hergot was used twice, for joy and anger. Those that appeared once were ježíši kriste (fear), pane bože (sorrow, pity), prokristapána (fear) and prisámboh (joy).
From those interjections that appear more than once none is used unusualy. Hm is used for hesitation and thinking (4 cases) and once for agreement, doprdele (written both together with the preposition and with a pause) for anger (5 cases) and once for fear, he for misunderstanding (2) and for surprise (1), fuj for disgust, hej to attract attention, etc. There is one interjection I would like to attract attention to as an evidence of the author’s creativity, at least I think so, and that is kruciprdel, used once to express anger.
Comparison To sum up, the use of interjections in both original texts differs significantly, in A Confederacy of Dunces the interjections are used frequently and form an inherent part of the characters´ speech. Švandrlík in Černí baroni does not use so many interjections and creates his characters´ idiolect and personalities by using other methods. Kořán as a translator tries to catch the colourful speech of Toole´s characters by using even a greater variety of interjections than Toole. Kořán employs a completely different translating strategy from Mucha (Šťastný Jim). He translates oh by its equivalents (ach, ó), he creatively translates the empty vocatives, he rarely uses omissions. He makes use of “ale” as a very flexible word which can suggest not only objection but also surprise, anger, sorrow, pity (ale, ale) and even joy. Kořán also uses no in his translation, it is the most numerous interjection in Černí baroni, as it was in Muži v offsidu. Kořán does not use it as much for translation of interjections as for translation of other parts of speech, sometimes he simply adds it to make the dialogue more vivid, natural. For example he adds it to rhetoric questions like “Ain´t that terrible?”- “No, není to
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hrůza?” No is added to these questions in 10 cases. He also sometimes translates invitations or pacifying “okay” and “come on” by no tak (13 cases), sometimes also “well” and implied hesitation is translated by no (12 cases) (see table 27).
Table 27: Translation of interjections in Spolčení hlupců by Jaroslav Kořán A Confederacy of Dunces Spolčení hlupců
number
interjection - interjection interjection - no int. no interjection - interjection
404 156 50
% of the total in the source text (560) 72% 28% 9%
no (40 occurrences), proboha (2), kruci (3) hergot (2) and other empty vocatives)
Table 27 shows that Kořán uses as many interjections as possible, because A Confederacy of Dunces is written in a relaxed, colloquial language of which the interjections are an inseparable part and Kořán wants his translation to have the same effect. Also, he did add as many interjections as Mucha in Šťastný Jim did. The most often added interjection is no which, as this study shows, is very frequently used in Czech. What can be a little unnatural in this translation (as far as interjections are concerned) is quite a large number of achs and also achich, which does not appear very often but is marked.
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2.3 Warren Miller: The Cool World, Josef Škvorecký: Prezydent Krokadýlů and Petr Šabach: Hovno hoří These two novels differ from each other quite significantly by the year of publication, there is fifty years difference between them. The Cool World was published in 1959 and Hovno hoří in 1999. The stories are both written in the first person narrative, in a colloquial language which resembles spoken language but direct speech is not used very often. Both novels were cinematized – Miller´s novel into a movie with the same name and Šabach´s into Pelíšky and partly also into Pupendo. Both movies are more famous than the novels, which can be proved by a simple search on the Internet, which, especially in case of Miller’s novel, will show that the text is not much written about. Miller’s The Cool World is told by Duke Custis, a young black gang member from Harlem. The novel is written in a black dialect with many grammatical errors. It is conceived as a confession of a young criminal. It tells a story of Duke’s pursuit of a gun and his fall when he gets it. The story may be sometimes funny but the overall impression is not funny at all. It is a story of a poor boy with a very small chance to escape the life of a criminal. Interjections that can be found in this novel are partly the common ones - oh, Christ, uh - and partly quite special ones like Man or shitman. Škvorecký as a translator employs very peculiar language that nowadays may seem sometimes unintelligible, especially to the young generation. In Šabach´s Hovno hoří there are three persons from whose point of view the stories are written. The main theme is the relationship between men and women and their different perception of the world around them (see various reviews on the Internet, for example short reviews on www.milosnemec.cz). The language of the stories is colloquial and relaxed. The most often used interjections are again empty vocatives and no. The novel lacks primary (subjective) interjections like ach.
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Table 28: Interjections found in The Cool World and Prezydent Krokadýlů The Cool World man oh onomatopoeic* uh oh man shitman empty vocatives uh (un) huh ah I.I.I.I. total
number 57 39 31 23 21 20 17 7 4 3 255
Prezydent Krokadýlů páni, pánove onomatopoeic doprdele empty vocatives ach hm no hovno
number 77 29 17 15 14 5 4 3
178 (with other interjections) *Onomatopoeic interjections are: slump, slump slump, boom, boom boom boom, whish, eeeeyuh, total
thum, thum thum, whoooom, voooom, thic thic..., bam, thuck, chomp, whack (some appearing more than once).
Table 29: Interjections found in Hovno hoří interjection no proboha panebože do prdele ježíšmarjá do háje onomatopoeic* once appearing total
number 28 14 5 4 2 2 6 13 74
*Onomatopoeic interjections: ááách (breathing), škyt, pssst (breathing), hrrrr, klapity klap (some appearing more than once).
Tables 28 and 29 show that both authors do not employ such a great variety of interjections in their texts. Miller’s novel has a higher density of interjections than Šabach (Miller 0,469% and Šabach 0,232% of all words). One of the reasons for this difference is that Miller uses interjections outside direct speech, which Šabach does not. Šabach also, as Švandrlík in Černí baroni, uses other parts of speech to express emotions.
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Warren Miller: The Cool World, Josef Škvorecký: Prezydent Krokadýlů Table 30: What interjections express in The Cool World. used to express emphasis onomatopoeic address hesitation, thinking anger disagreement, objection joy sorrow, pity fear agreement impatience surprise remembering understanding total
number 58 31 24 23 21 16 16 13 10 10 6 6 4 3 255
translated or substituted 53 29 19 21 16 14 16 13 9 8 6 6 4 3 217 (85%)
Man, oh Man, shitman These expressions appear very often in the text and are very specific for this novel. These words are not usually classified as interjections but in this text they work so. Their meaning as nouns and addressing and the naming function are lost. The meaning gets lost mainly in Duke’s narration, outside direct speech. In indirect speech, in narration, Man is only an empty phrase; Duke talks to the reader as the book is written as a confession, but he does not really address anybody. In the dialogue the addressing function is preserved (that is why these were not included into this group, they were also translated differently (“vole”), Škvorecký also felt the difference). Man does not even express any particular emotion, it is used mainly for emphasis (34 cases), (for example: “Man it was rough at Valley Forge an places like that” “Páni ve Valley Forge a při takovejch průšvihách to teda bylo drsný”) and address (14), the rest is distributed among fear (2), surprise (2), joy (2) and other emotions. Škvorecký uses omission and other interjections (ksakru, namouduši) only twice, by far the most often he translates it by equivalents (mostly páni, pánové, once appears člověče and chlape). He realizes that this interjection is a part of the boys´ speech,
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and that it must be translated mostly by the same word because it is almost always used in the same situation. Oh Man expresses more emotions; it was used 21 times and expresses joy (6 cases, with o Man), impatience (3 cases), surprise, anger, fear, sorrow, pity (2 cases each) and agreement, disagreement, address and emphasis (1 each). It is translated as páni, pánové again. Shitman is a compound of “shit” and “man”. It appears 20 times in the novel. The translator is sensitive to the emotion it expresses. When it is used for anger, it is translated as doprdele (for example: “Shitman I liven in places like that all my life”- “Doprdele celej život jsem bydlel v takovejhle barákách”), when it expresses disagreement, it is translated as hovno (“Shitman the reason headbreakers usen the Colt is because they dont know better”“Hovno. Pendrekáři nosej Colty poněvač sou pitomý”). Hovno is sometimes used in Czech to express strong disagreement; it could also be considered closest to equivalent of shitman. Shitman is used to express anger (9 cases), emphasis (5 cases), anger (3), surprise, fear and impatience (each 1). These interjections, these phatic addresses, are very specific feature of this novel. No other of the novels I worked with has such a great number of them. In the original English texts “man” is not used the way Miller uses it. Only in Lucky Jim by Amis, “old man” as an expression close to an address appears three times. In the Czech texts similar words appear, but they are also closer to real address than the expressions Miller used. In Švandrlík´s Černí baroni “člověče” (man) appears 15 times and “vole” 13 times. In Šabach´s Hovno hoří “člověče” appears twice and “vole” 9 times. And in Muži v offsidu by Poláček “člověče” appears 8 times. None of the authors uses “pane” or “pánove” (written without the diacritics in Prezydent krokadýlů) the same way Škvorecký does. “Pane” appears as a real address in all four Czech texts.
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Oh Oh is the second most often used interjection in the novel. It appears 39 times and the translator again prefers omission to other translating methods (see table 31 below).
Table 31: Methods of translating oh in The Cool World by Josef Škvorecký method of translation equivalent other interjection other part of speech omission total
number
% of the total
example
16 5 6 12 39
41% 13% 15% 31%
ach, ó no, bože jo, ano, víš
Oh is mostly used for address, anger and disagreement, surprisingly often translated as ach. It probably, in translator’s view, belongs to Duke’s style, to his way of expression, of writing.
Table 32: What oh expresses in The Cool World used to express address anger disagreement emphasis sorrow, pity agreement remembering understanding fear joy surprise hesitation
number 9 6 5 3 3 3 3 2 2 1 1 1
% of the total number 23% 15% 13% 8% 8% 8% 8% 5% 5% 3% 3% 3%
% among other int. expressing the same 38 29 31 5 23 30 75 67 20 6% 17% 4%
translated or substituted 77% (7) 33% (2) 60% (3) 33% (1) 100% (3) 33% (1) 100% (3) 100% (2) 100% (1) 100% (1) 100% (1) 100% (1)
It is interesting that Škvorecký translated or substituted oh so frequently when it is used as a part of an address, the other translators (except for Kořán) avoided translation or substitution in this case. Another interesting feature is that the less frequently oh is used to express particular emotion the more frequently it translated or substituted (see the last lines of table 32).
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Uh According to dictionaries, uh expresses either hesitation (Merriam-Webster), or request for repetition when something is misunderstood or surprise, confusion or uncertainty (OneLook Dictionary, www.onelook.com). This interjection appears quite frequently, often it is several times repeated (uh uh uh - counted as one), not really expressing any emotion, at least not for me. To me it seems more like urgent difficulty or inability to express oneself when something is, as well urgently, needed. It is listed as hesitation. Škvorecký translated it often as “teda” or “vole”. (For example: “Uh uh uh uh Duke now Man uh uh.”- “Teda Duke koukni vole teda”). His choice of “teda” suggests that he also understood the word as hesitation or inability to express oneself. It often used by Blood, a drug addict, who utters the majority of the uhs in the text and it, in my opinion, helps to express his compulsive behaviour.
Table 33: Methods of translating uh in The Cool World by Josef Škvorecký method of translation equivalent other interjection other part of speech omission total
number
% of the total
example
0 6 15 2 23
0 26% 65% 9%
hm, no, chachacha teda, prosim tě
These were the most often used interjections in the text. The other group of interjections that appears often are the onomatopoeic ones. Škvorecký translates them either by the interjections very similar to the original ones, he changes a vowel or a consonant to make the interjection sound more natural in Czech - boom - bum, vooooom - zůůůůům, or he translates them by a different interjection, also more natural in Czech - slump - klap, thic - cvak. Twice he also translates it by a verb (“Harrison slam his book shut. It goes Thuck.”- “Harrison sklapne knihu až to práskne.”). Onomatopoeic interjections found in the text were – boom (translated as bum),
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slump (klap), whish (fít), bam (prásk), whack, thuck (by a verb), thic (cvak), thum (bum), whooooom (huííí), voooom (zůůůůůůům), eeeeeyuh (áááách), chomp (chrup).
Empty vocatives The remaining interjections are not very frequent. There are 17 empty vocatives, oh Christ, oh dear, Jesus, oh God. Christ, Jesus and God are translated by their equivalents - kristepane, jéžíš, panebože - oh dear is translated as ach kamaráde, bože and ach bože.
Table 34: What the empty vocatives express in The Cool World used to express
number
joy sorrow, pity fear impatience remembering anger emphasis
6 5 2 1 1 1 1
% of the total 35% 29% 12% 6% 6% 6% 6%
%among other int. expressing the same 38% 38% 20% 17% 25% 5% 2%
translated or substituted 100% (6) 100% (5) 100% (2) 100% (1) 100% (1) 100% (1) 100% (1)
The rest of the interjections appear only a few times. The most frequent of these is uh (un) huh, which is used 7 times and expresses agreement, it is translated by hm (1 case), hm no (5 cases) and once by “helemese”. Its opposite, hunh uh is used once for emphasis of negation and is translated as “fakt” (“No. Hunh uh.” - “Ne. Fakt”). Ah appears 4 times as a part of an address and is three times translated as ach and once omitted. I. I. I. I. is used three times, it probably an original spelling of ai, which expresses “pity, pain or anguish” (www.onelook.com). Here it is used for surprise (unpleasant) or disbelief and is translated by “namoutě, namoutě, namoutě” in all three cases. For example: “He shaken his head at whut he readin. He say ‘I.I.I.I.’ Like that. ‘I.I.I.I’” – “Vrtí hlavou nad tim co čte. Řiká. ‘Namoutě namoutě namoutě’. Tohle. ‘Namoutě namoutě namoutě’”
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Nah nah nah is an imitation of a woman´s refusal, and is translated as “depak, depak, depak”. Hey attracts attention and is translated as “hele”, damn is used for anger and is translated by its equivalent - sakra.
Petr Šabach: Hovno hoří In Šabach´s text the most frequent interjection is again no. The next most numerous group is the empty vocatives (namely proboha and panebože). The common, primary interjections (ach, he, aha) are not very frequent. The table of interjections found in the novel is at the beginning of this chapter (table 29). The interjections that appear only once are jééé, jé, prokrista, mno, haló, ksakru, aha, hergot, hurááá, he, ach, hm, tě pic. Onomatopoeic interjections are - škyt, ááááách, áááách, pssst (sounds of breathing), klapity klap and prrr.
Table 35: What interjections express in Hovno hoří used to express emphasis anger sorrow, pity onomatopoeic agreement joy surprise fear hesitation, thinking objection address understanding invitation total
number 21 15 6 6 5 4 4 4 3 3 1 1 1 74
% of the total (74) 28% 20% 8% 8% 7% 5% 5% 5% 4% 4% 1% 1% 1%
No In more than a half cases no appear as a personal locution of one of the characters in the beginning (“Co? No!”, 16 cases). Together with one simple no I listed these as an emphasis. The
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locution means something like Am I right? Right. The rest of the 28 is distributed among agreement (5), objection (3), invitation (1), anger (1) and hesitation (1).
Empty vocatives Empty vocatives counted together form the next greatest group of interjections in the text. To this group belong proboha, panebože, ježíšmarjá, hergot, prokrista, ksakru.
Table 36: What the empty vocatives express in Hovno hoří used to express anger fear emphasis sorrow, pity joy surprise thinking, hesitation total
number
% of the total
8 4 4 4 2 1 1
33% 17% 17% 17% 8% 4% 4%
% among other int. expressing the same 53% 100% 19% 67% 50% 25% 33%
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Anger is expressed by proboha (4), panebože (2), ksakru and hergot (both 1), fear by proboha (2), panebože and ježíšmarjá (both 1), emphasis by proboha (4), joy by panebože (2), surprise by proboha and hesitation by prokrista. From the remaining interjections do prdele is used in all four cases to express anger as well as do háje (2). Jééé and hurááá express joy, he, jé and tě pic are used for surprise (jé for pleasant, he and tě pic for unpleasant), ach and hm express sorrow and pity, mno hesitation, haló attracts attention and aha is used for signalling understanding.
Comparison The novels share several features - there are not many subjective, original interjections, on the contrary, there is quite a large number of secondary interjections (empty vocatives) and onomatopoeic ones.
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Table 37: What interjections express in The Cool World and Hovno hoří used to express
The Cool World
Hovno hoří
58
Prezydent Krokadýlů (only int.) 41
emphasis onomatopoeic address hesitation, thinking anger disagreement, objection joy sorrow, pity fear agreement impatience surprise remembering understanding total
31 24 23 21 16 16 13 10 10 6 6 4 3 255
29 17 8 16 12 16 9 9 6 6 6 1 2 178
6 1 3 15 3 4 6 4 5 0 4 0 1 74
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Though the language of Hovno hoří is not as colloquial or even peculiar as the language of Prezydent Krokadýlů, Šabach and Škvorecký employ similar interjections in similar situations, for example for agreement Šabach uses 5 times no and Škvorecký 4 times hm no, to express anger they both use doprdele (Škvorecký writes the preposition and the noun together), Šabach 4 times and Škvorecký 9 times. Škvorecký does not use so many deviated forms of empty vocatives as Šabach when translating interjections but he employs this strategy when he translates the intensifiers. “The hell” used as intensifier is 6 times translated as ksakru or sakra. “God dam it” is translated as sakra krucifix or as krucinál (see table 38). The high number of emphasising interjections is also common to both novels; it is a part of colloquial language. There is a relatively high frequency of onomatopoeic interjections, mainly in The Cool World; this feature is still present in the speech of the adolescents and Škvorecký was right to translate them by interjections and not by verbs.
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As the other already discussed translators, Škvorecký also added some interjections to the text. He did so when translating the above mentioned intensifiers and when translating “well”, “you know” which he translated by no. He also adds one ach.
Table 38: Translation of interjections in Prezydent Krokadýlů by Josef Škvorecký The Cool World - Prezydent Krokadýlů interjection- interjection interjection - no interjection no interjection - interjection
number 178 77 24
% of the total in the source text (255) 70% 30% 9%
no (15), empty vocatives
Table 38 shows that Škvorecký very frequently translated an interjection by an interjection, he translated 70% of the interjections in the original. He realized that the interjections form a very important part of the speech of young people. He, as well as Kořán, added mostly no, which is a typical interjection of Czech texts.
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2.4 Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Book, Aloys a Hana Skoumal: Kniha džunglí and Josef Čapek: Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce
Now I get to the representatives of literature for children. Both The Jungle Book and Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce share the main feature - there are mostly animals as the main characters (except for Mowgli, who is human but brought up by animals). Kipling’s The Jungle Book was published in 1894, it is composed of three stories about Mowgli, the man cub, about Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, the mongoose, and about Toomai, the elephant handler. These stories contain much of what Kipling knew about the jungle and about India. They are seen as fables, the animals in the stories have human characters and the stories should give a moral lesson to the reader. An interesting fact about this book is that it is one of “founding” texts of the Scout movement because of the morals of the book. (www.usscouts.org/profbvr/jungle_book, en.wikipedia.org). This book is for older children than the Čapek´s one. Josef Čapek´s Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce was published in 1929. Čapek started writing stories for children as his own children started learning to read, so the book is written for an age group between 6-8 years old). Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce is to the present one of the most popular and one of the best books written for children in Czech Republic. I doubt there is a child who does not have it on his or her bookshelf. The book is composed of various comic adventures that Pejsek and Kočička experience while doing the everyday things, for example, cooking or tiding up the house. Concerning the interjections The Jungle Book contains the classic ones (oh, o) as well as the unusual ones (arre arre), as the setting is exotic and the author tried to keep a bit of this exotic feature in the language. There is also a large number of onomatopoeic interjections - mainly, obviously, the animal sounds.
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Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce has not such a number of animal sounds as Pejsek and Kočička are conceived more as humans than Kipling´s characters. The most numerous interjection is again no, followed by jejej, panečku, etc. The interjections in these two books differ probably more than in the case of the other pairs discussed here, as the age groups the novels are aimed at differ, and the difference is very important for the style of writing.
Table 39: Interjections found in The Jungle Book and in Knihy džunglí The Jungle Book o oh onomatopoeic hai oho bah hi hah phew ahaa ah faugh pah hsh wah umph ugh once appearing
number 35 30 19 5 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 22
total
143
Knihy džunglí ach hej hoho héj aha fuj fú jéje pst hurá ó hm, chm chm áaa, ah-h-á au, ouvej hola hola hola aaa-sp ahah, ehé uf fí hehe, haha uá, uach hurá pch other once appearing onomatopoeic total
number 7 6 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 5 18 59
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Table 40: Interjections found in Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce interjection no panečku jéjej, jejej aha jemine ach heč hej ha ha ó jej, ó je hm fuj au au propána oho propánajána no no onomatopoeic total
number 12 8 7 5 5 3 3 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 16 73
Numbers in tables 39 and 40 may be misleading. The greatest density of interjections was found in Josef Čapek´s Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce, where the interjections form 0,628% of all words. The reason is obvious, the book is written for very young readers and interjections are quite important in literature for such young children, probably because interjections are among the very first words a child utters and which he or she understands and understandability is one of the requirements for literature for children.
Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Book, Aloys and Hana Skoumal: Knihy Džunglí The interjections found in Kipling’s novel are very varied, many of them appear only once or twice in the whole text. The most numerous are oh and o, the other interjections found in the text
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are used less than 5 times, usually once, twice or three times. As was said above, many of the interjections are very unusual due to the exotic setting. The interjections appearing more frequently are listed in table 39. Once appearing interjections are aah, ah-h-á, ouch, heh, arulala wahooa, ahoo, ts ts, arre arre, ai, aihai, huah, ouach, ahae, aaa-ssh, ow, wow, hmph, ohe, hillo illo illo, hum, hurrah, arre arre hai yai kyaa - ah. Onomatopoeic interjections are whoof, ho ho (3 times), ha ha, hhrrmph, rrrt, rrrmph, rrrhha, augrh, aaarh, uhrr, yarrh, grr, arrh, wah, sssss, heya--hullah, heeyah--hullah
Table 41: What interjections express in The Jungle Book used to express
number
% of the total
address surprise onomatopoeic anger contempt sorrow, pity emphasis comforting, soothing fear objection joy salute pain relief attention seeking agreement understanding total
41 22 19 11 8 7 7 6 5 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 1 143
29% 15% 13% 8% 6% 5% 5% 4% 3% 3% 2% 2% 1% 1% 1% 1% 1%
translated or substituted 17% (7) 73% (16) 94% (16) 55% (6) 63% (5) 57% (4) 0% (0) 100% (6) 100% (5) 75% (3) 100% (3) 100% (3) 100% (2) 100% (2) 100% (1) 100% (1) 100% (1)
The largest number of interjections is used for address because two most frequent interjections were employed to express it, and that are o and oh.
O
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The most numerous is o (35 occurrences), for the most part used as a part of an address (31 occurrences), in accordance with the dictionary definition “expression used when addressing a person, thing, etc.” (OALD 848). The remaining four os are used to express emphasis (3 cases), for example “Haste! O haste!” - “Honem. Honem.” and anger (1). The translators omitted the most of it. As was said many times before, ó and ach is not used in Czech with address very often.
Table 42: Methods of translating o in The Jungle Book by Aloys and Hana Skoumal method of translation equivalent other int. other part of speech omission total
number
% of the total
2 0 1 32 35
6% 0 3% 91%
ó, ach milý
Oh Oh with 30 occurrences is the second most frequent interjection in the novel. Again the most often used method of translation is omission, but the other methods were employed here as well:
Table 43: Methods of translating oh in The Jungle Book by Aloys and Hana Skoumal method of translation equivalent other interjection other part of speech omission total
number
% of the total
example
5 1 4 20 30
17% 3% 13% 67%
ach aha ale, co, inu, copak ty
Examples of usage of the other parts of speech: “Oh, thou art a man´s cub”- “Copak ty, ty jsi člověčí mládě” “Oh, if you trying to back out” - “Inu, jestli si netroufáš do rvačky”
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As well as translation of it, the use of oh is more various than that of o.
Table 44: What oh expresses in The Jungle Book used to express
number
% of the total
address anger sorrow, pity emphasis surprise objection contempt understanding
7 5 4 4 4 3 2 1
23% 17% 13% 13% 13% 10% 7% 3%
% among other interjection expressing the same 17% 45% 57% 57% 18% 75% 2% 100%
The remaining interjections appear only one to five times and I will choose those that were translated unusually or creatively. Hai is one of the exotic interjections and is used for comforting, soothing. It was translated as héj which in Czech definitely does not evoke comforting. As an expression of surprise hai was translated as jéje. Oho also expresses surprise and is translated by other parts of speech that express surprise in Czech - “cože” and “podívejme se”. Bah, when it is used for contempt, is translated as uch and fuj, both interjections are usual expression for contempt in Czech, the translators tried to vary their vocabulary by using different expressions. The onomatopoeic interjections are usually translated by transforming English spelling to Czech usage, for example changing ph to f, or omitting h at the end of the words (hhrrmph - hrmf, augrh - augrr).
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Josef Čapek: Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce Čapek´s book is similar to Kipling’s in the usage of interjections, there is a great variety of them, but they are not used very often. Onomatopoeic interjections again appear quite often, not only animal sounds but also sounds inanimate objects (for example car - tu-tututú). As was said at the beginning of the chapter, Čapek´s book has the greatest density of interjection of all the novels studied here. It is so because it is meant for the youngest readership. It is necessary to add one thing - though there are many interjections in the text they are not used cheaply, in a kitschy way. The interjections that were found in Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce are again listed at the beginning of the chapter. Onomatopoeic interjections are: haf, haf, cilililink (3 times), hehe, hehe, hihihi, ratata ratata, mňáááuf, mňáaauf, ňaufňaufňauf, rrrrrr, hňauf, hňaf hňaf, tu-tututú.
Table 45: What interjections express in Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce used to express onomatopoeic emphasis surprise joy understanding fear objection boasting unspecified emotion anger hesitation, thinking attention seeking sorrow, pity remembering pain address total
number 16 13 7 7 5 5 4 3 3 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 73
% of the total 22% 18% 10% 10% 9% 7% 5% 4% 4% 3% 3% 3% 1% 1% 1% 1%
No As in every Czech book discussed here, the most frequent interjection is again no. It appears 12 times and expresses mainly emphasis.
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Table 46: What no expresses in Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce used to express emphasis unspecified emotion fear objection anger joy total
numbe r 5 3 1 1 1 1 12
% of the total 42% 25% 8% 8% 8% 8%
% among other interjections expressing the same 39% 100% 20% 25% 50% 14%
Panečku The second most numerous interjection in the text, panečku, can be counted in the empty vocatives group, panečku is a diminutive of either only pane or of panebože with “bože” omitted that would be a deviation of the vocative. Panečku is also mostly used for emphasis (6 cases) (for example: “[P]es má, panečku, ouška nějak citlivá”) and once for surprise and objection (ó panečku).
Jéjej, jejej These interjections differ only in diacritic, their usage is the same. They are used to express surprise (5 cases) (for example: “Jéjej, tady je anděl a Mikuláš”), joy (1) and emphasis (“[J]éjej, děti, co ona toho ještě našla”).
Jémine Jémine belongs to the same category as panečku, it is a deviated form of “Jesus”. Its use is more varied than that of panečku. Jémine expresses joy (2 occurrences), fear, surprise and objection (1 each).
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The other interjections are used according to their dictionary definitions, there is no original usage. Aha is used in the usual way, to express understanding and that in 5 cases. Ach does not appear very often, only three times, twice it expresses fear and once a part of an address. Haha is not included in the onomatopoeic interjections because here it used to express mischievous joy. Heč as was said is an interjection used mainly by children, as an expression of boasting or of joy. Hej attracts attention (2 cases), hm expresses thinking (2 cases), ó je is expression of joy; ó jej is used for emphasis. Oho expresses remembering, propána fear and propánajána sorrow and pity. Fuj appears not as expression of disgust but for anger, no no is an objection and au au expresses pain.
Comparison Translators of The Jungle Book, Skoumals, employed the method of omitting the interjections that are not frequently used in the Czech language and sometimes they translated such interjections with the other parts of speech. They translated The Jungle Book 70 years after its first publication and they seem to have made the language more up to date and more readable than the original. Those interjections that appeared as an exotic feature of language, the Indian interjections, were only adjusted to the Czech spelling (arrulala! whoo! - arulala! hú!).
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Table 47: What interjections express in The Jungle Book, Knihy džunglí and Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce used to express address surprise onomatopoeic anger contempt sorrow, pity emphasis comforting, soothing fear objection joy salute pain attention seeking agreement understanding relief total
The Jungle Book 41 22 19 11 8 7 7 6 5 4 3 3 2 1 1 1 1 142
Knihy džunglí (int. only) 5 13 18 5 3 4 0 6 3 0 3 3 2 1 1 1 1 69
Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce 1 7 16 2 0 1 13 0 5 4 7 0 1 2 0 5 0 73 (containing other categories not included in the table)
The table shows that the translators of the novel tried reduce those interjections that do not appear so often in Czech as in English (see, for example, the reduction of interjections expressing address or surprise). They also omitted those interjections that do not appear often in the literature for children, anger and contempt. Skoumals do not translate the other parts of speech by interjection, as was the case in other pairs that were studied here.
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3. Final Comparison
In this section I would like to compare the translations and the original texts on a more general level. The first thing that will be explored is the difference in the use of interjections in standard literary language and in colloquial language. The difference is very clearly visible in both original texts and in the translations. The fact is that the more literary the language is, the fewer interjections there are, this is true for both languages but more for Czech. Second, Czech literary texts seem to prefer secondary interjections to primary interjections (see Trávníček´s classification in chapter An Interjection). This tendency appears in those texts that are written in a standard language but also in colloquial texts. Third, variety in the use of interjections to express particular emotions will be examined. In the last part the translators’ attitudes will be compared on a general basis. Amis’s Lucky Jim and Kipling’s The Jungle Book are written in standard literary language. The number of interjections in the originals is significantly higher than in the translations. If the total numbers of interjections are counted, the interjections make up 0.247% of all words in Lucky Jim and 0.271% in The Jungle Book whereas in Šťastný Jim the translated interjections represent only 0.071% of all words and in Knihy džunglí 0.176% of all words. On the other hand Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and Miller’s The Cool World are written in non-standard language, A Confederacy of Dunces a colloquial language with many dialogues, in a language specific for New Orleans and The Cool World in a black Harlem dialect. Interjections appear more often in both the originals and the translations – in A Confederacy of Dunces the interjections represent 0.429% of all words and in The Cool World 0.464% of all words. The translations retained most of the interjections – Spolčení hlupců 0.324% and Prezydent Krokadýlů 0.373%. The reason for reduction of interjections in the translations of standard literary language texts is, in my opinion, a different perception of primary, original (subjective) interjections in Czech and English. Czech uses primary (and secondary) interjections more often in the colloquial
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language, interjections are more connected to spoken language and many of the primary interjections are often seen as marked (for comparison see tables 48 and 49). In literary texts secondary interjections, mainly empty vocatives appear more often than primary interjections. Secondary interjections seem to have become a more natural part of the language and are not perceived as marked, definitely not so often as primary interjections. English uses primary interjections in literary language more frequently than Czech. On the average, in original English texts primary interjections make up 59% whereas in Czech texts it is only 24%. I reviewed the translators´ dealing with most numerous primary interjections in the texts and compared them with secondary interjections. I found out that Mucha in his translation of Lucky Jim omitted 60% of occurrences of oh in the text and translated by equivalents only 2% of these. On the other hand he used equivalent to translate 61% of the empty vocatives in the text and omitted only 9%. Skoumals in their translation of The Jungle Book omitted 91% of occurrences of o in the text; equivalent appears in 6% of the cases. Unfortunately, there are no empty vocatives in The Jungle Book so the comparison here is not complete. The situation is different in the two remaining texts. In A Confederacy of Dunces Kořán translated by equivalent 58% of ohs present in the text and omitted 24% of them. For translation of all empty vocatives Czech equivalents or the other empty vocatives were used. Škvorecký in his translation of The Cool World uses equivalent to translate 41% of ohs appearing in the text but omitted 31% of them. He also translated all empty vocatives by their Czech equivalents or by the other empty vocatives. The use of the empty vocatives in original Czech texts will be discussed in a moment.
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Table 48: Translation of oh and of empty vocatives in all translated texts equivalent Šťastný Jim - oh Šťastný Jim – empty vocatives Knihy džunglí - oh Spolčení hlupců - oh Spolčení hlupců – empty vocatives Prezydent krokadýlů oh Prezydent krokadýlů – empty vocatives
other interjections 14% 21%
omission
2% 61%
other parts of speech 24% 9%
17% 58% 100%
13% 8% 0%
3% 9% 0%
67% 24% 0%
41%
15%
13%
31%
100%
0%
0%
0%
60% 9%
Table 48 shows that translators really deal with the primary and secondary interjections differently. Primary interjections (and to a lesser extent also secondary interjections) are used more often in the texts written in colloquial language than in texts written in literary language. I will try to support this claim by comparing the original Czech texts. First of all I would like to make a brief comment on style of the texts. Poláček´s Muži v offsidu is colloquial in dialogues and literary in the narration, but sometimes very ironic. Šabach´s text is also written in colloquial, relaxed language. Čapek´s Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce is written for a very young readership and that makes the language of the novel specific – it has a high number of interjections and the reader is addressed directly from time to time, which does not appear in any other novel discussed here, and Švandrlík´s text can be considered to be closest to the standard literary language but the style is ironically elevated. The density of interjections in the Czech text is as follows: the most interjections can be found in Čapek´s Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce – 0.628% of interjection among all words, I think that this is so because of the age group the novel is written for – little children – whose word stock may still contain a lot of interjections and thus the texts conforms to that feature of children’s language. Poláček´s Muži v offsidu comes next with 0.377%, then Šabach´s Hovno hoří with 0.232% and the last one is Švandrlík´s Černí baroni with 0.150% (approximately – the novel in electronic form is not complete).
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As was said in the corpus study itself, the most numerous of Czech interjections is no. Etymology of no is not clear, it used to be, and partly still is, an invitation (like English “come on”), similar to Czech nu and also to na (Holub-Lyer 336). It is not exactly one of the primary interjections. So in Czech texts primary interjections appear less frequently - mainly to add colour and vividness – and secondary interjections are used more often.
Table 49: The most often used interjections in the Czech texts
Muži v offsidu – no Muži v offsidu – empty vocatives Muži v offsidu – ach Černí baroni – no Černí baroni – empty vocatives Černí baroni – ach Hovno hoří – no Hovno hoří – empty vocatives
32,4% (of the total – 222) 5,4% 5% 49,7% (of the total – 175) 24% 0% 37.8% (of the total – 74) 32.4%
Hovno hoří – ach Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce -no Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce - empty vocatives Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce - ach
2.7% 16% (of the total – 73) 19.1% 4.1%
Again, the language is important for the choice and the occurrence of primary and secondary interjections. As was said above Černí baroni can be considered to be written in more standard language than the remaining three texts. In this text no forms half of the interjections used in the novel and another quarter is made up by the empty vocatives, on the other hand there is no ach (which I chose as a representative of primary interjections and for comparison of the use and frequency of appearance of ach in the translations and in the original Czech texts). In Šabach´s Hovno hoří and Poláček´s Muži v offsidu the level of language is approximately the same, though Šabach language is, obviously, more up-to-date. The difference is in the use of the empty vocatives, in Poláček´s text they represent only 5.4% of the interjections whereas in Šabach´s text it is 32.4%. I think that in Poláček´s times authors were more careful with the empty
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vocatives and used deviated forms of the vocatives (jemine, panečku) because of the religion and the taboo (the name of God). The use of no and ach remains the same. Čapek´s Povídání o pejskovi a kočičce is rather a specific case, as was said above in chapter II.4, the text is meant for the children who are just beginning to learn to read. The density of interjections is great because the interjections belong to the first words a child utters and they remain an important part of their speech for a long time. The choice of interjections also shows the fact – panečku, jeje, and especially heč.
On the whole, Czech prefers secondary interjections to primary interjections and that particularly in the literary language.
Table 50: Average numbers of primary/secondary/onomatopoeic interjections in original Czech and English texts and translations
English texts Czech texts translations
primary int. 59% 24% 40%
secondary int. 34% 67% 40%
onomatopoeic int. 7% 9% 20%*
*The onomatopoeic interjections are very frequently translated by equivalents, that is why there is such a high number of them.
The most often used secondary interjections are the empty vocatives, and while the use of primary interjections differs significantly in Czech and English original texts, the empty vocatives are used approximately the same way (the empty vocatives make up 17.3% of all interjections in Czech texts and 14.1% in English texts). Here is the comparison of the use of the empty vocatives in the original English texts, in their translations and in the original Czech texts.
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Table 51: Use of the empty vocatives in Lucky Jim, The Cool World and Confederacy of Dunces used to express anger surprise fear disgust sorrow, pity
number 33 32 28 25 10
% of the total number of empty vocatives (172) 19% 19% 16% 15% 6%
Table 52: Use of the empty vocatives in Šťastný Jim, Prezydent Krokadýlů and Spolčení hlupců used to express anger surprise fear disgust sorrow, pity
number 31 31 26 22 9
% of the total of translated empty vocatives (166) 19% 19% 17% 13% 5%
Table 53: Use of the empty vocatives in Muži v offsidu, Hovno hoří and Černí baroni used to express anger fear sorrow, pity joy
number 28 18 12 6
% of the total number of the empty vocatives (77) 36% 23% 16% 8%
Tables 51-53 show that while the emotions that are expressed by the empty vocatives are approximately the same, the frequency with which they are used differs. To return to the previous section I would say that this fact is related to the Czech preference for secondary interjections and also to the difference in numbers of interjections used to express various emotions which will be discussed later.
There is another interesting feature in the Czech translations – in A Confederacy of Dunces or The Jungle Book – there is a tendency to use a greater variety of primary interjections than the original, especially with interjections that are used once or twice. For example in The Jungle Book there are 22 interjections used once which makes up 15.4% of the whole. In Knihy džunglí there are 18 interjections used once and that makes up 30.5% of the whole. In A Confederacy of Dunces
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interjections used once make 0.4% of the number, whereas in the translation they make 1.7% of the whole number. It may be argued that with the reduction of interjections in the translation it is natural that there are more interjections appearing once, but the fact is that if, for example, an interjection appears in the original four times it is translated by three different Czech interjections and once omitted. For example, Kořán translates whoo, which is used five times, by five different interjections – juchúúúú, žúúú, páni, hergot and chacha. Translators in this case seem to be translating the emotion the word expresses rather than the word itself. Unfortunately, this cannot be proved with the remaining texts, there is not enough interjections appearing once to make a significant comparison.
The last difference I would like to explore here is the difference in the use of interjections to express various emotions. In this case the numbers do not speak as clearly as in the case of the primary and secondary interjections. I counted the percentage, the average numbers, which show the proportion of interjections that express given emotion. The results are these:
Table 54: Mean percentage of interjections expressing given emotions in all texts used to express anger surprise joy fear sorrow, pity objection, disagreement understanding
English originals 9,3% 11,5% 4,3% 3,7% 4,5% 7,1%
translation s (only int.) 7,5% 9,3% 4,7% 3,7% 5,8% 2,8%
translations
Czech originals
1,3% 3,5% 0,4% 1,2% 0,9% 3,3%
12,1% 8,3% 7,1% 5,5% 8,4% 6,1%
4,3%
3,8%
1,2%
3%
(substitutions)
The numbers show that the there are differences between Czech and English original texts, which is natural and can be partly caused by the different stories in the texts. I would like to pay attention to the translators´ individual style here. Table 54 shows that in all but one cases the
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number of translated interjections is higher or lower according to the number of Czech interjections. This tendency is, in my opinion, not surprising; the translators did this intuitively with feeling for their mother tongue. The only exception is anger where the number of translated interjections is lower than in the original English text even though the number of interjections expressing anger is even higher in the Czech texts. I would ascribe this to the fear of overtranslation – fear as an emotion is usually expressed by an empty vocative or by a taboo word in Czech originals, these words are quite expressive and the translators may have been afraid to use them more often. I would also like to draw readers’ attention to the two highest numbers of substitutions in cases of surprise and objection, disagreement. For example: “‘Erran? Hey! I thought this a sweepin and moppin job.’” “‘Pochůzku? Tak to prrr! Já jsem najatej na zametání.’” “Aw, Santa! I’m too old, girl.” “Ale di ty, Santo. Na tohle jsem stará.” (Toole). In Czech example may be: “‘Hej, tatíku!’ zvolal, ‘dejte tu ženskou z ruky. Copak se to patří?’” or “No, já myslím, že to tak honem nešlo.” (Poláček). Substitution makes up more than 3% in both cases, while the rest of interjections is substituted in around 1% of cases or less (0.4%-1.3%, see table 54). This is also caused by the translators´ intuitive use of the parts of speech that are used to express these emotions in Czech. These are expressed by a verb (objection, disagreement) – “počkejte”, “heleďte” – or by “ale”, “kdepak” etc. Surprise is usually expressed by “ale, ale”, “heleďme”, “tak”. As was said above, the empty vocatives may be the cause of the difference in the numbers of interjections expressing anger, fear, joy and sorrow, pity. When tables 51-53 are compared and all of them then compared with table 54 the result will be that empty vocatives are used most often for these emotions and that these emotions are more often expressed by an interjection in Czech than in English. I think that the connection here is clear. Because Czech uses more empty vocatives to express these emotions than English, they are more often expressed by an interjection (by an empty vocative) in Czech.
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The translators chose different methods of translations. On the average, they translated 62.5% of interjections found in the original texts. On the whole, the interjections in the translations were reduced regarding the original texts – in the translations the interjections make up 0.236% of all words, in English and Czech it is 0.353% and 0.347%, respectively. The differences between the translators are quite great. Mucha in his translation of Amis´s Lucky Jim translated 29% of interjections, Skoumals in Knihy džunglí translated 65% of the interjections, Kořán in Spolčení hlupců translated 76% and Škvorecký in Prezydent krokadýlů translated 80% of interjections. Why Mucha omitted so many interjections is not clear. The translators´ methods are connected to the previous discussion of the use of primary and secondary interjections in all cases, I think, because all the translations in this sense share some characteristics: omission of primary interjections that appear often, translation of the empty vocatives by equivalents or by approximate equivalents; on the whole, reduction of the total number of interjections. Kořán´s and Skoumals´ translations also share one characteristic – though the number of the primary interjections in the translations tends to be reduced, those interjections that appear less frequently (up to 5 times) are usually all translated and the translation is done according to the emotion the interjection expresses, not by a dictionary equivalent. The reasons why the remaining two translators do not fulfil this characteristic are, I think, these: Škvorecký in his translation of The Cool World did not increase the number of interjections like Kořán because the language of the novel is very specific and he did not want to add anything of his own invention. And Mucha was very careful with the translation of interjections, maybe because the use of interjections in his source text is not varied and he was afraid of repetition on one hand or overtranslation on the other. Translators also added interjections in places where Czech usually uses them. The most often added ones were aha (“I see”), no (added, “come on”, “well”). On the whole, they added 20% interjections - Mucha 33 (60% of interjections translated by interjections), Škvorecký 24 (13% of
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the number of interjections translated by interjection), Kořán 50 (12% of the number of interjections translated by interjection) and Skoumals none.
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4. Conclusion
The aim of this corpus study was to find out whether there is any difference between the use of interjections in the original English texts, in their translations and in the original Czech texts and which strategies the translators used when dealing with interjections. The results of my study can be summarized as follows. The most numerous English interjections is oh, in Czech it is no. The next most numerous group in both language are the empty vocatives. Czech uses fewer interjections than English (interjections make up 0.353% among all words in English and 0.347% in Czech); translations are in the middle, with the average number of translated interjections around 62%. The reason seems to be that Czech does not have many primary interjections in texts written in standard literary language; it prefers secondary interjections, mainly that group of them which is called empty vocatives. These are used more often in texts written in both literary and colloquial language. Empty vocatives are used more often in Czech; on the average they represent 17.3% of all interjections in Czech texts, 28% in the translations and 14.1% in English texts. This has an influence on the numbers of interjections used to express chosen emotions (those that appeared in every text). These emotions were surprise, objection, understanding, anger, joy, fear and sorrow, pity. The first three of these were more often expressed by an interjection in English; the remaining four were expressed by an interjection more often in Czech. Anger, joy, fear and sorrow, pity are more often expressed by an empty vocative and surprise, objection and understanding have the highest number of substitutions in the translations - it follows that when there are those emotions that are expressed by an empty vocative in Czech, translators do so and when there are emotions for which Czech does not use an interjection translators prefer substitution or omission. The translators had different approaches to the translation of interjections. Their attitude to translation of interjections differed according to the text they translated. Those translators that translated texts written in standard language used fewer interjections than those who translated
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texts in colloquial language. The only translator who differed in his translation method was Jiří Mucha (Šťastný Jim). His by far the most preferred method was omission; he omitted more than 70% of the interjections. The translators also added some interjections, Mucha, surprisingly, added the highest number of them. The added interjections appeared in places where “I see” (aha), intensifiers (empty vocatives) and invitations or question tags were used (no). Kořán and Mucha also employed a greater variety of interjections in their translations. They tried to reproduce the emotion rather than the interjection. As there is no study on the use of interjections it was no clear what the outcome would be. I expected there would be greater differences in the emotions and the numbers of interjection by which these emotions are expressed. These did not appear to be so significant. On the other hand, it was surprising for me that such a high number of empty vocatives appear in both languages and that there is such a difference between use of primary and secondary interjections in both languages. It would be interesting to find out how the differences between the use of primary and secondary interjections work in different genres and to compare these differences. Comparison of texts of different genres translated by one translator could also come up with valuable results. As was shown here, every translator has his own translation method and it would be interesting to see whether he holds to it irrespective of the genre he translates.
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5. Sources:
Primary Literature:
Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. London: Victor Gollanz Ltd, 1957. Čapek, Josef. Povídání o pejskovi a kočičice. Praha: Albatros 1984. Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Book. New York: The Century Co. 1909. Kořán, Jaroslav, trans. Spolčení hlupců. By John Kennedy O´Toole. Praha: Odeon 1985. Miller, Warren. The Cool World. New York: Crest Books, 1964 Mucha, Jiří, trans. Šťastný Jim. By Kingsley Amis. Praha: Odeon 1970. Poláček, Karel. Muži v offsidu. < http://go.to/eknihy> Skoumal, Aloys and Hana, trans. Knihy džunglí. By Rudyard Kipling. Praha: Odeon 1976. Šabach, Petr. Hovno hoří. Praha: Paseka 1994. Škvorecký, Josef (as Jan Zábrana), trans. Prezydent Krokadýlů. By Warren Miller. Praha: Odeon 1990. Švandrlík, Miroslav. Černí baroni. Praha: Mladá Fronta 1991. Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy od Dunces. London: Penguin Books 1981.
Secondary Literature:
Curme, George O. A Grammar of the English Language. Vol. 2: Parts of Speech and Accidence. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company 1931. Curme, Gerge O. A Grammar of the English Language. Vol. 3: Syntax. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company 1931. Encyklopedie Universum. Praha: Odeon 2001.
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Grepl, Miroslav and Petr Karlík. Skladba spisovné češtiny. Praha: SPN 1986. Havránek, Bohuslav and Antonín Jedlička. Česká mluvnice. Praha: SPN 1981. Holub, Josef - Stanislav Lyer. Stručný etymologický slovník jazyka českého se zvláštním zřetelem k slovům kulturním a cizím. Praha: SPN 1968. Jovanovic, Vladimir Z. "The Form, Position and Meaning of Interjections in English". Linguistics and Literature 3.1 (2004) 17-28. Trávníček, František. Neslovesné věty v češtině, díl 1. Věty interjekční. Brno: Masarykova universita 1930. Trávníček, František. Nauka a slovní zásobě. Praha: SPN 1958.
diploma theses: Kamenická, Dana. Slovesa a citoslovce vyjadřující zvuky, jejichž původcem je zvíře, popř. neživotná substance. Brno 1987. Uhrová, Zdeňka. Slovesa a citoslovce vyjadřující zvuky, jejichž původcem je člověk. Brno 1987. Zbořil, Jiří. Translation of Interjections. Brno 1998.
web pages: OneLook Dictionaries Merriam-Webster Dictionary Rap Dictionary 25 January 2007
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia 18 October 2006 9 March 2007 Slovník Seznam
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