What happened to the modal expressions? Modality in translating Chinese texts into English

Abstract

This article investigates how modality is handled in Chinese-to-English translation, in order to identify a range of choices available for translators and the relative frequencies of the choices. The study uses a self-built parallel corpus of Chinese government documents on Tibet and Xinjiang and their English translations. Modal expressions in the source and translated texts are analyzed according to the type and value of modality. Results show that the strategies of modality omission, modality retaining, and modality addition are adopted in the process of translation. High-valued modal expressions in the Chinese source texts are likely to be left out or translated into expressions of lower values. Median-valued modal expressions tend to be retained, and most added English modal expressions are of median value. Low-valued modal expressions enjoy similar distributions in the source and translated texts. These translation strategies result in a decrease in high-valued modal expressions and an increase in median-valued modal expressions. The type of modality tends to remain unchanged in the process of translation. Possible factors affecting the translation choices are discussed in terms of the communicative conventions and the tenor of the source and target texts.