The contrastive study describes the most frequent greetings and saying goodbye used in the Czech and French language, and defines and evaluates the ways in which they can be translated. In the present study, the data were gathered from the parallel corpus InterCorp. The research includes an interlinguistic questionnaire survey carried out in the Czech Repub lic and France. The results of this survey showing the assessment of polite phrases by native speakers of either Czech or French are confronted with the findings of the contrastive analysis to identify and characterize in detail potential translation problems between French and Czech especially in terms of the use of formal and informal greetings and saying goodbye.