“Is it as plain as a pikestaff?” On the translation of Dutch similes into Czech

Abstract

The Dutch similes cannot—similarly to other types of idioms—be translated literally word by word. The specific, broader context in which they occur, must always be taken into account. On the other hand, the translators can benefit from the fixed syntactic-semantic structure of the similes and from the many similarities between languages in the field of phraseology. In various cases they can also get inspired by the translations that are part of the different parallel corpora. In this article the Dutch similes are briefly described and characterized. Then the possibilities are discussed how these specific idioms can be translated into other languages. This system is illustrated with several examples of the Dutch similes and their Czech equivalents. Finally, on the basis of the excerpts from the parallel corpus InterCorp, the way is investigated in which the Dutch adjective-based similes were translated in the Czech translations of Dutch literary texts.