Differences in Construal in Douglas Adams’s "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" and its Polish Translations

This paper, aiming to illustrate construal, is a study of selected extracts taken from Adams’s science-fiction novel: the source text, and its two translations by Banaszak and Wieczorek. While analyzing corresponding parts, we observe the discrepancies in terms of dimensions of construal. They are presented in the subsections: Prominence, Specificity, Perspective. The concepts in Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, focusing on human mind, allow us to study grammatical and semantic aspects (regarding them as equally meaningful) with the same tools. Analyzing different aspects of texts or expressions’ conceptualization, the level of equivalence between the source and target texts can be investigated.