A prayer, or an appeal to the audiences? Speech acts and genres theory employed in analysis of translatological series (based on Polish equivalents of the Epilogue of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest)

Comparison of eight Polish translations of the fi nal segment of the Epilogue in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest reveals an essential diversifi cation in the contents of these translated versions. The differences appear in the identity of Prospero and in the discursive structure of his monologue. This article attempts to describe this diversifi cation with the use of the categories of acts and genres of speech, since it is these that form the ‘construction material’ of utterances, including literary texts, creating diverse confi gurations in them. These categories of description, enabling insight into compositional actions done on simple forms of discourse, elevates the analysis of translation practices and consideration of the issue of equivalence of translation to a higher level of text organisation.