Translation Of Modal Verbs In Nigeria Company Law

The development of computer science has brought about a rapid development in the use of linguistic corpus.In her book Corpora in translation study-an overview and some suggestions for future research published in 1995,Mona Baker divided the corpus into three catogries:parallel corpora,multilingual corpus and comparable corpus.Compared with the other two,the parallel corpora is most closely linked to the computer-aid translation.The author of the represent report adopts the corpora set up by Hu Dan,a teacher of Guangdong Police College,and builds a database of his own to form the parallel corpora in his translation project to help translating the modal verbs in Nigeria Company Law.Based on the translation practice,this report aims to discusse E-C translation of modal verbs in the legal text Nigeria Company Law.The author’s translation project contains modal verbs shall,should,may,might,can,could,must,need,and ought to,whose frequency of appearance reached 2.5%altogether.The shall and may are the two with the highest frenquency,reaching to 1.46%and 0.86%respectively.The modal verbs have both the epistemic function and cognitive function,which may cause troubles to the translators because of their subtle implications.For example,the modal verb shall usually has four interpretations,and can be interpreted as "has to do","must do","will do" and "should do"respectively;while the modal verb must can only express one mandatory obligation in legal text;commonly,the modal verb may means a kind of right or a permission,which can be explained as"have right to do".Obviously,there is a significance overlapping between shall and must,which communicates the mandotory obligation;on the other hand,the modal verb must is opposite to may in legal texts when it comes to obligations and rights,with each can be translated as "must do" and"have right to do".The negtive forms of those three modal verbs are may not,shall not and must not(must not usually exsists in tenancy agreement,public note or warnings,not in the leagal texts).The order presented above shows the negative modal strength from strong to week,with ""may not"being the strongest.That is to say,the modal strength of their negative forms is contrary to that of their affirmative forms.This will confuse many translators.Due to the limited options in in English-Chinese translation of the negative modal verbs,a translator sometimes feels hard to render a proper translation of the original modal strength in order not to bring about ambiguity or even misunderstanding.This report discusses the above issues and also introduces briefly how to deal with the less used modal verbs like should,might,can,could,need,ought to,and will.This report contains seven parts,including Foreward,Introduction of Translation Project,Relation between Parallel Corpora and Translation,Analysis of the Target Text,Translation of Modal Verbs in Positive Forms and Negative Forms,and a Conclusion.Part of Forward focuses on the purpose and methedology of this report;part of Introduction of Translation Project presents the content,the requirements and the process of the projecrt as well.Part of Relation between Parallel Corpora and Translation renders a brief relation between parallel corpora and translation;part of Analysis of the Target Text deals with how to translate the modal verbs properly in the text;Conclusion provides a summary where some suggestions that relates to modal verbs’ translation are put forward and,the advantages and disadvantages of the parallel corpora in comoputer-aided translation are pointed out.