Il verbo tedesco sollen e i suoi equivalenti funzionali in italiano : Analisi corpus-based per la traduzione

Germanic and Romance languages exhibit many asymmetries in the linguistic encoding of modality, for instance through the grammatical category of modal verbs. Aim of this paper is to investigate how the German modal verb sollen, an extremely multifunctional form, can be translated into Italian. To do so, we draw on monolingual and bilingual corpora of journalistic texts and try to understand which factors are responsible for which translation strategy. In this respect, we argue that three main contextual pieces of information determine the choice of the translation strategy: (i) the reference to the source of the obligation, (ii) the reference to the future, and (iii) the reference to the source of the information. In particular, only the reference to the source of the obligation (i.e., the deontic interpretation of sollen) makes it possible to translate the present indicative forms of sollen with the present indicative forms of the Italian modal verb dovere. In the other cases, different strategies must be chosen. These involve a change of tense (from present to future) or of mood (from indicative to conditional) in Italian. In the final part of the paper, we argue that investigations based on comparable and parallel corpora can contribute to shed light on high multifunctional forms like sollen and to identify regularities in translation strategies which can be applied in the teaching of translation.