This article aims to examine the role of modal verbs in the language of the laws. The goal is to see whether we can say that modal verbs, like in English, are part of the terminology of the language of laws in Albanian, considering that so far, there is no research conducted in the Albanian language on this field. For this study, we established a corpus of legislative texts in both Albanian and English in a bid to analyze the ways modal verbs are translated, using applicable laws published in the official Gazette of the Republic of Kosovo. Besides, the Albanian language has a verb system that differs from that of English. In comparison, the Albanian language has only three modal verbs officially recognized and accepted by Albanian linguists and scholars: Alb. mund (Eng. can), Alb. duhet or lypset (Eng. must) and Alb. do (Eng. must), English has a wide pattern of expressing modal verbs. Consequently, as our research demonstrates, translators will find it difficult to translate them properly. Correct usage of modal verbs is one of the greatest challenges of the legislator as they play a vital role in the wording. Yet, the main purpose of this research paper is to determine if there are equivalents between English and Albanian modal verbs and investigate their occurrences in legislative texts giving an account of the differences in complexity in lexical and grammatical modality.
Our paper conducts a contrastive analysis between Albanian and English lexical units in the language of laws using corpora analysis. It fills a literature gap related to Corpus linguistics in order to better comprehend patterns of legal lexicon. We use KWIC Concordance to extract the top frequently words and concordance lines in order to analyse differences and similarities among lexical units in Albanian (Source Language) and English (Target Language) laws, compared to those identified in respective corpora. Additionally, we identify types of errors in translation, difficulties in translating legal texts, and factors that influence translators’ errors in translating certain laws of the Republic of Kosovo from Albanian into English. According to our analysis, both languages have in common the use of the same grammatical patterns such as: conjunctions, prepositions, and the use of the common noun forms. The rest have significant differences in their usage, especially with regards to particles and determiners. Our contrastive approach demonstrates that some of these laws were not originally written in Albanian and then translated into English language, as many articles within these laws lack the appropriate word structure and word order and in some cases are semantically ill-formed in the Source Language. Key words: analysis, corpus, language, legal, translation, KWIC Concordance.
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