A Comparison of the Occurrence of Modal Tenses and Modal Verbs in Fiction

The aim of my graduation thesis was to establish to what extant modality is preserved in translations of the modal tenses modal past tense and modal past perfect tense in the novel “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll. The older translation is called “Alica v cudežni deželi” and was made by Gitica Jakopin and the second is called “Alicine prigode v cudežni deželi”, made by Helena Biffio. I wanted to establish whether the amount of preserved modality is higher in translations of modal tenses in conditional clauses where modality is more apparent than in the case of modal tenses in their usual contexts (e.g. with the verb wish and in the context of if only), where modality is less apparent. Furthermore, I examined the preservation of modality in the translation of modal verbs could, should and would and also compared them with the other two modal structures. The reason I focused on the structure of the English modal system which is not represented in the curriculum of Slovene schools and teaching English as a foreign language as much as conditional sentences and of course modal verbs, is because I wanted to point out that the number of examples of modal tenses in literature is not negligible and the function they carry is important. There were two main research questions which I focused on. Firstly, I wanted to find out to what extent English modal structures (modal verbs, conditional clauses and modal tenses) are translated into Slovene. I predicted that modality will be better preserved in translations of the modal verbs could, would and should, less in the case of modal tenses in conditional sentences and least in the case of modal tenses in their usual contexts and that translation of the modal past perfect tense will be more consistent when used in conditional clauses than in its usual contexts. The analysis showed that modality is better preserved when modal tenses are used in their usual contexts and the translation of modal past perfect is also more consistent in such cases. The second research question deals with the differences between the two translations in terms of modality. I took into consideration that Gitica Jakopin's translation is older than Helena Biffio's and therefore it is possible that she was more precise in translating modal past perfect tense into Slovene predpreteklik, which proved to be true, although the analysis showed that modality is in general better preserved in the translation by Helena Biffio. Where she had lost her percentage is in preserving modality when translating modal past perfect, either in conditional clauses or in its usual contexts. This confirms my hypothesis that predpreteklik (past perfect) is through time decreasing in use in literature, even in English-Slovene translations.