"Slepice hledá žrádlo."
Translation:The hen is looking for food.
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Kuřata (Chickens) are the little yellow birds. And slepice is a mother of a chicken.
This is a confusing topic. In Czech there is SLEPICE (adult female chicken) and KUŘE (baby to adolescent chicken of either sex). And of course, KOHOUT (adult male chicken = rooster).
Slepice is technically HEN
Kuře is technically CHICKEN and sometimes called CHICK.
So far so good. The confusing comes when you talk about groups of these. While we have SLEPICE in our back yard and use that word as a general blanket noun to describe all members of the chicken family, Americans (and probably Brits as well) have CHICKENS and that includes the adult animals. At the same time, when you buy chicken in the store, it still is called Chicken and it really is an adolescent bird. If you ever cooked adult "chicken" you would see the difference. They need to be cooked longer and are tougher. So confusingly enough Chicken is both baby chicken and adult, which is considered a hen in Czech.
Well i don't know the exact age when the bird is not called chicken anymore and becomes hen.
Chicks and chickens are both called kuřata. The new born and very little chicks can be called with diminutive "kuřátko (SG:), kuřátka (PL.)
Why is feed for zradlo not accepted? It's the closest English translation if I understand correctly.
A better translation for "feed" (noun) is "krmivo" which is derived from the verb "krmit" = "to feed".
Thus, "Slepice hledá žrádlo" - it's looking for food, anything to eat.
"Slepice hledá krmivo" - it's looking for chicken feed, i.e. for seeds and whatnot left there by a human specifically to feed the hen(s).
"Feed" is now accepted, but I am unable to say whether it was added after you posted, or if your answer contained something else that caused Duo to reject it.
My guess is because žrádlo is usually used for animal food, not food for people. It seems more like "feed" or "chow" than like "food."
I wrote " A chicken looking for food". Why is this incorrect? (What is it? A chicken looking for food."). I thought that when there is no article that it could be either - the, or - a.
No, Czech does not work that way. The Czech sentence is a full sentence with a normal verb and your answer has to be as well.
looking for used adjectively is hledající BTW
The sentence started with "slepice" and not "ta slepice", so it is "hen" or a hen but not "the hen"
Not necessarily. The English definite article doesn't always have an equivalent in Czech. And the English sentence cannot start with "hen" without any determinant.