Translating strong obligation in Slovene and English legal texts: A bidirectional study

Abstract

Normative legal texts prescribe the manner of conduct – they impose obligations, permissions or prohibitions. As law has a great impact on reality, linguistic expressions of strong obligation and their use are a valuable topic. The goal of this research was to analyse how the use of two modals, i.e., morati and must, differs in the source and target texts of Slovene and EU legislation. To do so, a bidirectional bilingual corpus containing almost 600,000 words was compiled. The corpus consisted of the subcorpus of Slovene legislation in Slovene (source) and English (target), and the subcorpus of EU legislation in English and Slovene. The analysis has shown some differences in the use of the two modals: morati is more frequently used than must in both subcorpora; there is an important difference in the use of both modals between Slovene and EU legislation. Some shifts in the degree of strength of obligation were also found, however some proved to be successful translations nonetheless.