Introduction

After November 1989, the political change influenced society and all fields of life. Since then, also the field of translation, where people communicate every day using foreign languages, went through a lot of changes. The English language has replaced the Russian language, that used to be the biggest source of translation. In the new era, information and knowledge have begun to be distributed to the wide public. Today, our lingvistic enviroment is dealing with new types of texts, which couldn`t be positively classified to any of the functional lingvistic style. These types of texts offer presentation of the scientific information on the one side, but they also emphasize the personality of the author and often use methods of the style of literary works. Their genre, lexical and stylistic diversity is very wide and translator has to deal with its complexity. This new condition puts higher standards on translator`s work and his professional preparation.
As a student of translating studies, I have been strongly attracted to this new difficulty. I have decided to look into complexity of contemporary translating work and discuss it in my thesis.

The objects of this work are the books of Stephen Hawking, the most famous and charismatic theoretical physician since Einstein, and their Slovak translations. The objective is to compare the English originals and Slovak translations of Hawking`s books, with regards to all fields of philological research. Moreover, my purpose is to discover the basic characteristics of non-literary texts with literary elements in the source texts and in the translated texts and to define who should translate these types of texts according to evaluation of the level of chosen individual translating methods.
In the first chapter I introduced the personality of Stephen Hawking. This chapter shows all fields of the life, scientific and literary work of this exceptional man.
The second chapter explains some theoretical tasks, mainly in the field of translation, equivalency and translating shifts. In this chapter I followed work and views of the prominent linguists and theoretics of the Slovak theory of translation. I paid a specific attention to the state of searched problematic in Slovak theory of translation.

The linguistic and stylistic fundaments, analytic part will rely on content of the third chapter. Its core forms characteristics of the scientific prose style and the style of literary works in Slovak and English language, as well as theoretical description of the basic types and features of the non-literary texts with literary elements and their translation. This theoretical part is the framework for my following analysis.
The fourth chapter of this work contains the characteristic of the Hawking`s own style of writing, introduces the analyzed books and includes their analysis. Here, the analysis of the source texts and translations proceeds from lexical level through morphological and syntactical to the stylistic level.
The task of these analysis is to find out how the translators managed to transform the characteristic features from the source text to the translated text. Also, I tried in this chapter to identify some types of translating shifts in translations. An objective of this part of thesis is not to criticize the individual translating methods, but to present translator`s different approach to the translation of non-literary texts with literary elements (hereby the Hawking`s books) and to evaluate assets for a translating practice.