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Lenka Mundevová Translation of Colloquial Language Devices in Fiction: A Century of Maupassant's Ivrogne in Czech Translation Abstract The dissertation compares the stylization of the dialogues in the French original of Maupassant's short story Ivrogne (The Drunkard), written in 1884, with five Czech translations published between 1902 and 1997. The comparative analysis is focused on the devices of colloquial language, including dialect, which appear frequently in the dialogues of the story and prove to be extraordinarily useful when interpreting Maupassant's text. The analysis of the excerpted material is preceded by the description of the basic characteristics of colloquial French and Czech, followed by the description of their stratifications. The mutual relation of the colloquial language varieties is an important prerequisite for the evaluation of the translations of colloquial language devices and their appropriateness in the individual Czech versions of Ivrogne. The paper also deals with the development of Czech aesthetic translation standards and their relation to the standard of local fiction, outlining the important tendencies of Czech fiction translation applied when colloquial devices were conveyed from French to Czech during the specified timeframe. The individual language devices used in the...