This paper contains an analysis of the selected scenes from the play Krokodil Lacoste / Silvertown by Zlatko Topčić. The play won the “Alija Isaković” award in 2010, while the Cultural Association of Bosniaks Preporod published its dual Bosnian and English edition in 2016. The segments are analyzed parallelly in Bosnian and English for the purpose of observing the level of functional equivalence in the target text. The analysis entails extralinguistic and linguistic categories in accordance with the model developed by Hatim and Mason (1990) and later expanded by Zhang et al. (2015). The extralinguistic category includes, among others, the culture-translation relationship, and the linguistic category entails three dimensions: communicative, pragmatic, and semiotic. The analysis in this case includes the communicative and semiotic components.

The paper discusses the formation of semantic fields in dialogues from the Blackadder TV series, observed through Victor Raskin’s Semantic Script Theory of Humour, in two ways: in the source-text in English and in the Bosnian translation. The corpus is also observed through semantically relevant binary oppositions which this theory entails, as well as transformations realised in the translation procedure. The initial framework for establishing binary oppositions is Raskin’s model of three conceptual categories of semantic scripts: those of common sense, restricted and individual.

The Harry Potter franchise has proven an incredible success since the publication of J. K. Rowling’sdebut novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, in 1997. Achieving a worldwide success, theHarry Potter novels have been translated into many languages, including those spoken in Bosnia andHerzegovina. However, many of those translations originate from Serbia or Croatia. Our goal is toexamine strategies the Bosnian translator opted for in her translation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, published by Buybook, Sarajevo, in 2015. Translating literature for children is a demanding task since children are the most honest critics, hence, failure of the writer to enchant, and of the translator to successfully transpose the magic of a fairy tale, a poem, etc., is made clear upon first reading. In that sense, the Harry Potter novels are no exception. What is more, the translation process is even more challenging because Rowling created a new fantasy world, abundant with new phenomena (creatures, games, spells, geographical locations, etc.). How does a translator find suitable solutions for notions that had not been known prior to the publication of the first Harry Potter novel, and, at the same time, feel comfortable with the quality of the translated text, keeping in mind the young recipients? Our paper will focus on analysis of lexical categories and translation procedures observed in the translation of this novel into the Bosnian langugage.

Humour has been an inexhaustible subject of many a linguistic research effort, starting from sociolinguistics, through discourse analysis, to pragmatics. Incongruity is at the very core of all linguistic research of humour, and it entails an opposition of semantic notions, causing an imbalance between the punchline and the expectations of the cognitive agents. That is how humour is generated. The aim of this paper is to observe the way in which conceptual metaphor contributes the rise of humour in Alan Ford, a comic widely popular even today in the former Yugoslav area. The comic’s popularity has been huge to the extent that many expressions and quotes have become part of everyday speech of many people.

This text is a part of a wider linguistic research dedicated to the works of Alija Isakovic, a writer who passed away almost twenty years ago, in March 1997. In light of the politeness theory, we will observe the selected scenes from his play To. In several illustrative scenes, we will only suggest the possibility of a more detailed linguistic analysis, especially from the perspective of linguistic disciplines, such as discourse analysis, or pragmatics. This paper is a modest homage to a man whose literary opus significantly enriched our culture.