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The paper surveys domestication, one of the characteristic features of a number of translations in the early period of the Czech National Revival in the first decades of the nineteenth century. At that time, translations played a role of enormous cultural significance in the development of Czech literature, making up for as yet unrepresented genres and providing models to enrich the corpus. A particular set of circumstances developed due to the social and political conditions of the Czech nation: after a period of gradual decline of the Czech language following the Thirty Years’ War, the Czech language was gradually regaining the status of a language of literature and science. From the twenties onwards the rising middle-class reading public demanded entertaining belles-lettres in Czech. Many of these translations were freely adapted mainly from contemporary popular German prose without crediting the original author and at times even plagiarized, as the writer Karolina Světlá, well-read in both literatures, later recorded in her memoirs. This paper presents two typical examples of localization of English pieces of literature. In his translation of Thomas Gray’s An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Josef Jungmann replaced the English historical figures (Hampden, Milton and Cromwell) with Czech ones (Thurn, Rokycana and Žižka), while Jan Kaška replaced the London characters and setting with Prague in his translation of a piece from Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz. These examples show how domesticated poems and tales typically preserved the original plot with localized characters and setting. At present we can see an increase in scholarly research of the original and translated literature of the period.

This paper reflects upon the relevance of the ideas of Peter Newmark to legal translation. Even though legal translation was not the focus of Newmark’s interest, he makes several references to legal translation in his writings, mostly in relation to authoritative statements, which is a broad category of texts introduced by Newmark and including legal and administrative texts. The paper provides a critical analysis of his ideas and puts them into today’s legal translation studies context. The second part of the paper includes a brief and non-exhaustive overview of Newmark’s con-cepts that have been echoed in legal translation studies, namely his list of translation techniques, and his dichotomy of semantic and communicative translation.

The paper describes the state of legal interpreting training in the Czech Republic, which, as it currently stands, focuses on legal terminology rather than specific interpreting techniques. Against this background of the existing training opportunities, the paper presents a pilot course on legal interpreting, including court interpreting, for BA and MA students of English for Translators and Interpreters at Palacký University Olomouc. It describes the design of the course, its content and the methodology applied. Specifically, it describes the different settings addressed in the courses and the materials and activities used to train interpreters for these settings, including a mock trial. Finally, the paper also discusses the challenges and potential room for further development.

Healthcare interpreting has been a topic of interest for various fields of study around the world for over 60 years; however, it has not yet been discussed comprehensively in the Czech Republic. This paper aims to lay the groundwork for future research in the country by providing a basic overview of the research findings abroad. Drawing on the summary article by Pöchhacker (2021), the contribution first examines studies and other works on interpreting in healthcare by researchers in fields other than translation studies, such as nursing, psychiatry, linguistics, and social sciences from the 1960s to the early 1990s. Afterwards, the paper compiles the findings of more recent studies from Africa; Asia and Australia; the United States, Canada and Mexico; and Northern, Southern, and Central Europe, concluding with remarks on the few works on healthcare interpreting that have been produced in the Czech Republic.

The aim of this paper is to discuss some of the challenges resulting from the fact that classes in translation taught at the Institute of Translation Studies (Charles University, Prague, Czechia) in its double degree programme offered jointly with Universität Leipzig are attended by students whose mother tongue is not Czech. Drawing on the results of action research conducted in two different translation courses, we describe the challenges that this non-standard situation represents for the teacher, how teaching methods need to be adapted, what implications this distorted directionality has on student assessment, how this combination of students with different mother tongues can enrich translation seminars and their participants, and what benefits it brings to the interaction between teacher and student and between the students themselves.

This paper reports on a research-training module in a conference interpreter training environment where students strive to acquire high-level interpreting skills through intensive practice over two years. Both theory and research are remote from their concerns. The module described was designed specifically for this environment. The aim was to raise the students’ awareness of the nature of research, of the gains it could offer to interpreters-in-training and to the interpreting profession, and of practical challenges it faces. Care was taken not to add a significant workload which they might view as irrelevant to their endeavours. This translated as an introductory two-lecture part followed by micro-experiments in which the students’ own interpreting exercises were used as material. The students were asked to record and transcribe their interpretations of experimental source speeches, to analyse and reflect on the data. In one exercise, they were asked to perform an experiment as researchers with other students as participants. Throughout the process, the instructors provided detailed guidance and explained how the experiments were designed, taking on board challenges and uncertainties, and what inferences could or could not be drawn from the data and why. A questionnaire at the end of the module suggests that the students found the module interesting, not excessively taxing, that it taught them something about research and also about interpreting. Since this module entails virtually no overheads as regards the students’ daily practice and gives them a good sense of the practical issues associated with research, it is suggested that it could be integrated into curricula with more traditional research training as well.

The aim of this paper is to discuss some of the challenges resulting from the fact that interpreting classes at the Institute of Translation Studies (Charles University, Prague, Czechia) are attended by students whose mother tongue is not Czech (double degree students from Universität Leipzig or Erasmus+ incoming students). Drawing on the results of action research conducted in two different interpreting courses, we describe the challenges that this non-standard situation represents for the teacher, how teaching methods need to be adapted, what implications this distorted directionality has on student assessment, how this combination of students with different mother tongues can enrich interpreting seminars and their participants, and what benefits it brings to the interaction between teacher and student and among students.