Shall in Legal Language and Its Translation Equivalents in Serbian

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the translation equivalents of the verb shall in legal discourse and in what way the relevance might be affected by the translator’s choice. For the purpose of this paper, the verb shall is viewed as a communicative clue the way it was defined by Gutt (1989) in his dissertation on relevance and translation. Verbs, especially modals, are not frequently used in legal register in Serbian1 , and here we are interested to see if this tendency is affected by the fact that original texts of legal documents in English are abundant in examples of the verb shall. The modal (and auxiliary) verb being examined is ambiguous, with several distinct meanings, and the main goal is to investigate how the meaning is narrowed in the target language, and what the effects on the explicatures and implicatures in the text are. Examples are excerpted from EU directives within the Development of Environmental Legislation project, in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (2002)