Modal Expressions of Necessity and their Non-explicit Counterparts

The paper presents a study based on excerpts from eight works of contemporary fiction which focuses on the cases in which corresponding to an explicit modal expression in the original text no explicit modal expression is used in the translation. In other words, it deals with necessity explicitly expressed at the lexical level in one language corresponding to the absence of such an expression in the other language, modal verbs being considered lexical means of modality. The study attempts to classify such cases and to explain the reasons behind the choice of the particular translations, for example, lexicalization, pragmatic factors, the translation copying the original does not sound natural, etc. Root and epistemic modality are dealt with separately, but at the end of the paper the individual findings are summarized to provide a complex picture.