Abstract
Abstract This paper explores, from a Systemic Functional Linguistics perspective, a set of three comparable regulatory texts in English, Chinese and Portuguese. In regulatory texts, different semantic strategies are used to regulate and control addresse’s behaviour. One key strategy for doing so is the use of the system of modality, more specifically the resources for assigning obligations to the addressee, thereby regulating his or her behaviour. Here we will analyze three tenancy agreements in terms of modality, that is, a bilingual parallel text in Chinese and English and its comparable version in Brazilian Portuguese. Our main objective was to bring out similarities and differences in the deployment of the resources of modality in order to propose that a functional perspective on legal translation may aid translators/interpreters and also translation/interpreting students to construct systematic understandings of the function of the text in a given situation type. In other words, it is possible to build a relationship between the context and the register in order to identify correlations between contextual features and linguistic ones.
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