A Study On The Translatability Of Modal Verbsof Scientific English

In recent years,EST has been widely used in English,so more and more scholars have begun to pay attention to translation issues of EST,one of which is the translation of modal verbs in EST.During the translation practice,the author found a great number of modal verbs being used in U.S.Navy Diving Manual,but the priority of this translation practice is to translate these modal verbs correctly.This report firstly describes the classification of modal verbs by Palmer,respectively,introducing the epistemic modality,evidential modality,deontic modality and dynamic modality,and the three meanings of Halliday's system functional linguistics,namely,ideational meaning,interpersonal meaning and textual meaning,as the benchmark of translation.Then,the modal verbs in the original text of U.S.Navy Diving Manual are analyzed and counted,some of which with higher frequency are selected and their characteristics are summarized.Finally,the most important part,the author reconstructs the Chinese translation of modal verbs from three aspects: ideational meaning,interpersonal meaning and textual meaning.The reconstruction of the conceptual meaning is mainly to realize the complete correspondence between English and Chinese modal verbs,respectively analyzing the meanings of English and Chinese modal verbs so as to find out the links between English and Chinese modal verbs.According to the meaning of the word,sentence structure and context,the specific meaning of modal verbs is chosen to determine the corresponding Chinese translation.The interpersonal meaning is reconstructed from both transformation of level value of modality and omission of modal elements.The reconstruction of textual meaning includes both mood coherence and intonation coherence,so as to achieve the consistency and coherence of the whole text.This paper argues that the translation of modal verbs should pay attention to the reconstruction of interpersonal meaning while paying attention to the reconstruction of the meaning of the concept,allowing the bilingual to deviate from the expression of modal meaning and form so as to achieve the dynamic balance of form and meaning in the translation.At the same time,a consistent tone should be made.