The aim of this study is to investigate how the modal auxiliaries will and shall and the semi-modal BE going to are used to express futurity by individuals whose first language is Swedish. The study is corpus based, and the corpora used in this study consist of Swedish newspapers in English (SWENC) and material from blogs which are written in English by Swedes (BESC). These are compared with the press sub-corpora in F-LOB (the Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English) and Frown (the Freiburg-Brown corpus of American English), which represent British and American varieties of English. The method is quantitative and the results are mainly presented in frequencies. The results show that all of the modals are used in SWENC and BESC. The core modal will is the most frequently used modal in all of the corpora and sub-corpora. The semi-modal BE going to is most frequently used in BESC and the second core modal shall is most frequent in SWENC. However, qualitative examination of shall revealed that the writers in SWENC use the modal differently from how it is used in F-LOB Press. This study shows evidence of variation in use of the modals which express futurity. The fact that the semi-modal BE going to exists in the Swedish material indicates that the process of grammaticalization continues in the Swedish form of English.

This study investigates how the semi-modal need to is translated into German/Swedish and which German/Swedish correspondences are translated into need to. To this end, the Linnaeus University English–German–Swedish Corpus (LEGS) is used. Nida’s (1964: 159-162) concept of formal and dynamic equivalence is used to perform the qualitative analysis and to discuss the results from the quantitative part of the study. The use of semi-modals such as be going to, have to and want to have increased during the second half of the 20th century (Leech et al.: 2009: 99). need to represents the obligation as being in the best interest of the subject and is associated with objectivity (Kastrone 2008: 829; Aijmer 2017: 28) Thus, need to is used to distance the speaker to avoid an authoritarian stance. This trend is a sign of an ongoing democratization (Leech et al. 2009: 270). The results showed that the preferred German translation is müssen (‘must’) (55%) and  the preferred Swedish translation is behöva (‘need’) (47%). ‘Other’ is the second preferred German translation and the third preferred Swedish translation. These results are reflected in the structures translated from German and Swedish. The results indicate that the semantic category of the co-occurring main verb and the co-occurring subject affect translation. Based on these results, it could be said that English, followed by Swedish, is leading the process of democratization. However, further studies are needed to confirm this hypothesis.