This thesis discusses the translation of deontic modal verbs from Swedish to German. The materialfor the study includes two chapters from Ribbings Etikett by Magdalena Ribbing (2016), a non-fiction book about etiquette. The source text contains the Swedish modal verbs kunna, skola, böra, måste, vilja and få. Only böra and vilja were consistently translated into the same German modal verbs: sollten and wollen. The other modal verbs have been translated into various modal verbs, showing that modal verbsgenerally do not have a one-to-one correspondent. One example is the modal verb skola that istranslated into various German modal verbs such as sollten, sollen and müssen. Also, all types of modal verbs were sometimes translated into a passive modal construction (haben/sein+zu+infinitive) or to sentences lacking modality.The translation of modal verbs mainly depends on the strength of modality. A modal verbwith a weaker degree of obligation such as sollten was often used in recommendations instead ofthe stronger müssen. Occasionally, a passive construction was chosen instead of a modal verb, inorder to avoid repetition of a certain modal verb.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-65383 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Zoege, Mareike |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | German |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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