Translation of the German modal particles ja, doch and wohl into Swedish and English

This study is corpus-based and concerns the translation of the German modal particles ja, doch and wohl into Swedish and English. The aim is to investigate how these modal particles are translated into Swedish and English, i.e. what translation strategies are used, in order to find possible differences in translation between both the two target languages and between the different modal particles. The material comes from the LEGS corpus and consists of 247 source-text instances of the modal particles ja, doch and wohl, and their translations into both Swedish and English. The target texts were categorized into the translation strategies: direct translation, omission, transposition and paraphrase. The instances of transposition were further divided into the categories adverb, verb and interjection. This study finds that for English the most frequent strategy is omission, while for Swedish it is direct translation. This suggests that the meanings of the German modal particles are more often disregarded in the English target texts and thus not transferred. Furthermore, for Swedish the direct translations ju, nog and väl, are the most common translations for the German modal particles ja, doch and wohl. As for English, when the modal particles were translated, they were most often translated through transposition with the adverbs probably, after all and of course.