Research into linguistic interference

republice – *the biggest House of Culture in the republic (the biggest cultural 
centre in the country). Generalisation in word-formation designates incorrect 
translations of, mostly, suffixes or literal translations of word forms from Czech 
into English. Hopkinson gives examples such as energetika – *energetics 
(energy industry), anglistika – *anglistics (English studies), etc.  
The last factor generating interference is called systemic and structural 
differences between Czech and English. This factor produces interference on 
higher levels, i.e. “on the morphological, syntactic and grammatical levels of the 
IL [interlanguage]” (Hopkinson 2007: 18). First, the differences in morphological 
systems cause interferences on the level of literal translation of parts of speech. 
Hopkinson gives examples such as pochování Bakuse do hrobu ve sněhu [...] 
– *burying of Bakus into the grave in snow [...] (the burial of Bacchus in the 
snow [...]), Městské muzeum – *the municipal museum (the City Museum). 
Second, differences in syntactic systems cause that translators frequently 
literally translate the syntactic structure of the source text and preserve the word 

---

 
32 
order in the target. As a result, the translated sentence sounds clumsy, 
sometimes it is even ungrammatical and the original emphasis is usually shifted 
to another element in the syntactic structure (due to differences in FSP). As one 
of the examples, Hopkinson mentions the following translation: více o bohaté 
historii kladenského průmyslu najdete na straně 10 – *more about the rich 
history of Kladno industry you will find on page 10 (you will find more about the 
rich history of Kladno’s industry on page 10). And third, Hopkinson presents 
interferences caused by differences in grammatical systems. He says that 
especially problematic seem nominal forms and genitive structures (in case of 
translations from Czech into English), which the subjects usually tend to 
translate using the preposition of. Hopkinson provides concrete examples of this 
occurrence: sdružení, které rozvíjí své aktivity v oblasti cestovního ruchu – 
*an association operating in the field of tourism (an association working in the 
travel industry), [...] byla posledním místem pobytu lidických žen – *[...] was the 
last place of stay for Lidice women ([...] was the last place where the women of 
Lidice stayed). 
As Hopkinson states in the conclusion to his paper, “this brief survey of 
selected factors in linguistic interference does not claim to be complete; it does, 
however, highlight the interdisciplinary approach which is required when 
researching issues of interlanguage and interference” (Hopkinson 2007: 22). 
Although Hopkinson does not come up with a classification of the types of 
interferences, his study is valuable for our research. It reveals some of the 
causes of interference which can help us to facilitate the classification. 
Moreover, it is definitely helpful to know the source of interference because it 

---

 
33 
enables the translator to analyse where the problem originated and what he/she 
should be careful of.