MODALNI GLAGOLI „MUST“ I „HAVE TO“ U ROMANU „SLUŠKINJINA PRIČA“ I NJIHOVI PREVODNI EKVIVALENTI

Abstract

The subject of this paper is a contrastive analysis of the English modal verbs must and have to and their translation equivalents in the novel The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, which is set in a dystopian world where norms, obligations, and prohibitions are strictly defined and controlled. This context provides frequent and semantically diverse use of modal verbs, which makes this novel suitable for analyzing translation practices in transferring modality from English to Serbian. The aim of the paper is to identify possible translation equivalents of English modal verbs analyzing one novel and its translation into Serbian, and to highlight translation strategies employed to convey modality in a specific narrative and cultural context. While must and have to share overlapping semantic fields, they differ significantly in terms of the source of obligation: must typically reflects the speaker’s authority or internal imposition, whereas have to conveys obligation derived from external circumstances. However, contemporary usage shows an increasing tendency toward their interchangeable application – an observation this study aims to examine and substantiate. In the Serbian translation of the novel, both types of obligation are generally expressed through the modal morati, which lacks the capacity to mark this distinction explicitly, which is therefore determined by analyzing the context, as is the case with the English language, given that the modals must and have to are increasingly used to express the same meanings. Drawing on the framework that categorizes English modal meanings into deontic, epistemic, and dynamic modalities, the study analyzes corpus examples according to these modal types, alongside their corresponding translations in Serbian. The analyzed examples have shown that in the novel, the most common translation equivalent of the English modals must and have to in the meanings of deontic and dynamic modalities is the verb morati, which is partly conditioned by the context of the novel. It has been noted that different translation solutions appear only in the case of epistemic modality (adverbials, non-finite verb forms, or shifts in tense and mood) in order to convey the original meaning as closely as possible and preserve the most natural expression in the Serbian language.