English it-clefts with Focused Subject from an FSP Perspective and their Czech Translation Equivalents

The paper offers a brief survey of relevant theory on English it-clefts, with an emphasis on information structure. In the practical part, it compares it-clefts with focused subject in original English written texts and their Czech translation counterparts, based on a sample research in the parallel multilingual corpus InterCorp. Due to the different means of expressing FSP in the two languages, Czech naturally uses other ways to convey the desired meaning apart from the cleft construction, such as word-order, focalizing particles, and other devices. To get a better idea about the extent to which the translation may be influenced by the surface structure of the original, another additional sample research was carried out using the same queries to find English translations containing it-clefts and their original Czech source sentences. The preliminary research suggests that at least in the chosen area, the source language does not seem to significantly interfere in the surface structure of the resultant translation.