Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies

4. Impact of the Translation

Concerning the type of medium which mostly reflects the influence, it is unquestionably periodicals as they do not necessarily adhere to the standard form; more likely, each periodical establishes its own standard and, thus, enables the infiltration of the English recipe trends. Even some typically Czech magazines, which are not the Czech versions of international periodicals, experience that. Nevertheless, it cannot be said what type of magazines it is, whether the one for women, or the one dealing solely with cooking or even some other one. None of the magazines follows all of the English recipe features; they rather choose some of them and incorporate them into their versions of Czech recipe form.

As for the gender preferences, they change from feature to feature. Three English trends are more favored by women and the other three are more prioritized by men. In general, with the exception of the structure issue, women equally divide their preferences between English and Czech traditional forms. On the contrary, opinions of men are often extreme.

Conclusion

The first scrutinized group of recipes showed that the traditional English recipe states how to preprocess ingredients in their list. The amount of these ingredients is preferably expressed in units of volume, mostly cups and spoons. The volume can also be measured by the units of the Anglo-Saxon measurement system, which is predominantly used for the categories of weight, length and temperature. What is also typical of English recipes is the fact that they precisely determine the size of dishes and cut foodstuffs. Their directional parts are highly structured. Each segment is very often marked to make the division more explicit. The directions are always written in the imperative form. Everything that is described above answers the question about the typical features of the standard form of English recipes.

The second analyzed group of recipes revealed that in all the discussed issues the form of translated recipes has been getting closer to the English recipe stereotypes. As far as structuring directions, processing ingredients, defining size, and addressing the readership are concerned; the shift has been rather fast and extensive in comparison with the one of two remaining issues, which have been overtaking English recipe trends only slowly. This paragraph at least partially answers the question about the form of the translated recipes.

The third and final explored group of recipes displayed that the traditional form of the original Czech recipes has altered in two features. An important mutation occurred in the directional part of recipes as the unstructured format of directions has changed to the opposite one. A modification of the way of processing ingredients has been less profound since the information describing what to do with foodstuffs is contained both in their listing and in the directional part like in the past. However, the recent form of some remaining features is no longer as unified as it used to be. Forms of address, for example, considerably vary in periodicals and even ordinary people divide their preferences among several forms. These are the second person plural, the infinitive (which is rather a way of delivering the directions than the form of address), and the first person plural, which is still dominant and can be considered as traditional. As for the amount of ingredients, it is still expressed preferably by units of weight. Nevertheless, the way of using spoons has changed, since nowadays they measure bigger amounts of a broader range of foodstuffs than they used to do in Czech recipes. Regarding the measurement system, the metric one is still preponderant. Nothing significant has happened with the way of determining the size in Czech recipes. It is still stated rather approximately. These facts answer the question about the traditional Czech recipe form and possible changes it has experienced.

All in all, it is highly probable that the typical form of English recipes has been partially projected into the standard form of Czech recipes because if the new features appearing in the latter ones are compared and contrasted with the traditional features of the former ones, it is obvious that they are identical.

Czech Summary

V teoretické části je čtenář seznámen s některými základními pojmy z oblasti korpusové lingvistiky a s využitím korpusů v překladu. Na konci této části je popsána kompilace korpusu, který je sestaven z ukázek receptů kuchařských knih, časopisů a receptů na internetu a byl vytvořen speciálně pro účely této bakalářské práce.

Praktická část se potom zabývá analýzou anglicky psaných, překládaných a českých receptů. Jejich postupným porovnáním zjišťuji, do jaké míry a zda se znaky typické pro recepty v anglickém jazyce promítají do formy překládaných receptů a jejich vlivem pak i do receptů českých. V poslední části docházím k závěru, že tu jist dopad formy receptů napsaných v anglickém jazyce je.