THE USES OF SHALL AND THEIR ROMANIAN AND SPANISH COUNTERPARTS IN PRICE STABILITY: WHY IS IT IMPORTANT FOR YOU?

Roxana-Petruta Goga-Vigaru, Romania, ID CLEaR2016-326;      The present study deals with the uses of ‘shall’ in business texts and the comparison with their Romanian and Spanish counterparts in point of epistemic and deontic modalities. Since the modal verb ‘shall’ expresses the writer’s/speaker’s attitude towards the utterance, in general, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the source language, i.e. English and target languages, i.e. Romanian and Spanish in the deontic and epistemic fields expressed by ‘shall’. In English, ’shall’ is used to express a variety of meanings, such as ‘futurity’, ‘obligation’, etc., but such meanings are not always expressed in Romanian or Spanish through a modal item, so, quite frequently, their correlations in the target languages (Romanian and Spanish) do not have the same pragmatic meaning, constituting a frequent pitfall in translation. My analysis is based on a business corpus from the ECB database concerning the European System of Central Banks and the cross-linguistic analysis is based on a trilingual corpus made of the corpora mentioned above and their Romanian and Spanish business equivalent texts.

Key-words: shall, equivalence, translation, epistemic, deontic