Modality and modal verbs in translation

The paper reports on findings from a recent study. On the basis of corpora, two legislative pair texts, the paper deals with the cross-linguistic issues about modals and modality in Croatian and English. In addressing the issue of modality in the two texts, the paper focuses on the semantic areas that include obligation and whether or not something is necessary, desirable, permitted or forbidden. Since modal verbs are a category by which speakers express their attitudes towards events, our aim was to study if a structure or class shift occurred, and if the meaning of modal verbs changed in translation from the Croatian (source) into the English (target) language. The study was based on a small corpus. Still, it allowed us to focus on the category in both languages and the issue of translation. We do not claim that the findings of the study lead to clear universals about modal verbs in Croatian and English. But we believe they can be conductive to a better understanding of Croatian and English, to the analysis of modals and modality and to the translation studies in general.