Die Problematik der Genera der Substantive in der Übersetzung von Märchen

In his book "Umění překladu"(1963), Jiří Levý describes three fundamental steps of the translation process. He calls for the thorough understanding, correct interpretation as well as stylistic transformation of the original text so that its meaning will not get lost as a result of inaccurate translation. The paper deals with some of the interesting problems that arise when translating words for fairy tale characters and objects from "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" by the Brothers Grimm into Czech or Italian. In these languages the corresponding words frequently have different genders from German. So the paper addresses the question of how much of a challenge the gender differences in German, Czech and Italian can be for the translator.