A Comparative Study of Modality in Translation of Legal Text from English into Persian

This study tested the hypothesis that there is a significant difference in the number of modal verbs and their Persian translation in legal texts. Data were gathered from two corpora: General Principles of the English Criminal Law and The Law of Contract and their translation into Persian. Tow theoretical models, namely, Palmer's (1990) and Rahimian's (1995 as cited in Rahimian, 2010) were used to label modal verbs in the two languages as epistemic, deontic and dynamic. Chi-square tests were run to answer the study question. Then it was found that the hypothesis regarding the difference between modal verbs in the two corpora could not be rejected. In conclusion, differences in the type and frequency of the choices in the target text can be related not only to linguistic constraints, but also to different social representations in translator's mind which are the internalized cognitive versions of particular public structure and processes.

کلیدواژه ها:

deontic modality ، dynamic modality ، epistemic modality ، legal discourse ، legalese ، modality