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- "Is it hard to be a judge?"
"Is it hard to be a judge?"
Translation:Je těžké být soudkyní?
11 Comments
Added. But note it is less used. The corpus has 23 hits for "Je to těžké být" and 1361 for "Je těžké být".
It sounds a bit like you change your mind and decide to specify what's hard, when you already started saying "It's hard." (period) -> i.e. "Je to těžké... být soudce."
My thought was it ought to be "těžký" (for soudce) but this is marked incorrect. I am presuming that is because the "těžké" complements the unspoken "it" rather than "soudce". Very confusing to an English speaker! I hope to get there in the end......
Well, after all, you're not trying to say that the JUDGE is hard, are you? ;)
Oops... Seems you have unwittingly opened the door to a new, marginally-related question. :-)
In the US, it would not be unusual to hear something like, "Wow, that judge is really hard on the lawyers who try cases in his/her courtroom!" -- meaning that s/he does not suffer fools gladly. What adjective, or other phrasing, would be used in Czech to convey that meaning of "hard"?
The basic equivalent of "hard" in its main meaning (when talking about objects or materials) is "tvrdý".
In this exercise, we already have a more abstract meaning of "hard", i.e. "difficult", and in this sense we use a different adjective: "těžký", which literally means "heavy".
To be "hard on" someone (severe, harsh) can also be expressed by the first adjective "tvrdý na (někoho)", but more commonly "přísný" (strict) or "drsný" (rough).
In response to BoneheadBass, same usage in the UK. As a bit of a diversion from this discussion, I doubt if another two common meanings of "hard on", found in the UK at least, (one means "fast asleep", the other might get me banned, depends how frank you allow here) would have an exact translation into Czech either........!
