Swedish Obligation Markers in a Translation Perspective
The Swedish modal auxiliaries meaning obligation in my material are maste, fa (may), ska/skulle (shall, should), bor/borde (ought to) (see Table 4). They are referred to as deontic modal auxiliaries in the Swedish reference grammar Teleman et al. (1999). The most frequent obligation marker is maste. The Swedish obligation markers have a different lexical origin than the English markers. Fa and ska/skall (unlike must/maste) have other modal meanings as well which do not appear in the translations of must. Fa is a modal auxiliary with the meaning of permission (‘may’) which has acquired the meaning of obligation and ska/skall can be ambiguous between deontically modal meaning and future meaning.
Fa was more frequent in fiction than in non-fiction while ska(ll) appears more often in the more formal non-fiction texts. Table 4 shows the correspondences of must only. If I had looked instead at the translations of have to I would have found some differences.[1]
Table 4 Correspondences of English must in the ESPC (EO-> ST)
|
Fiction |
Non-fiction |
Total |
|
|
maste |
90 (63.8%) |
234 (80.1%) |
324 (74.8%) |
|
fa (‘get’, ‘may’) |
28a (19.9%) |
18b (6.2%) |
46 (10.6%) |
|
ska(ll) |
9 |
18 |
27 |
|
bor/borde (‘should’) |
2 |
5 |
7 |
|
vara tvungen, tvingas (‘be obliged’) |
3 |
1 |
4 |
|
imperative |
2 |
- |
2 |
|
kan |
- |
2 |
2 |
|
tarvas (‘need’) |
1 |
- |
1 |
|
ar en nodvandighet (‘is a necessity’) |
- |
1 |
1 |
|
0 |
4 |
10 |
14 |
|
other |
2 |
3 |
5 |
|
Total |
141 |
292 |
433 |
a18 examples were negated b15 examples were negated
The translation paradigms provide only raw data. They do not provide any information about the contexts in which must or its alternatives are chosen as a translation. In the following sections I will discuss must and its most frequent variants have to and need and make comparisons with the Swedish correspondences. The following research questions will be asked: Are the factors determining the distribution and uses of obligation markers in English and Swedish the same? Are the factors the same in fiction and non-fiction?
- [1] Have to was for example translated into behova (‘need to’) in three examples.
