Modalità e oralità: il verbo modale tedesco sollen e le sue traduzioni in italiano nei corpora Subtitles e Europarl

Manuela Caterina Moroni – Università degli Studi di Bergamo

manuela.moroni(at)unitn.it

Abstract: In German and Italian, the semantic category of modality can be expressed through what are known as modal verbs. Contrastive studies (Milan 2001; Costa 2013) demonstrate that German modal verbs not only inconsistently correspond to Italian ones but also are more numerous than their counterparts. Thus, translation of German utterances containing modal verbs into Italian proves to be an arduous task. The present contribution focuses on the German modal verb sollen and its translation strategies into Italian. The paper particularly aims to (i) identify trends in translation choices from German to Italian and (ii) investigate the relations between these translation strategies, the context for the use of sollen, and the means of expression of modality available in Italian. To do so, I utilise data drawn from two genres of orality: the subtitles of films in the Subtitles corpus and the transcripts of European Parliament speeches contained in the Europarl corpus. Although somewhat consciously planned, the data nonetheless serves as a suitable starting point for extending research on modality, traditionally conducted on written language, to genres of orality.