EVALUATIVE MODALITY AS AN OBJECT OF TRANSLATION (CASE STUDY OF TRANSLATION OF A PUBLICISTIC ARTICLE ON MILITARY TOPICS)

Abstract

The article highlights the notion of modality from different scientific perspectives. The notion of modality is understood as a complex, functional and semantic category, which reflects the attitude of the speaker to the utterance, its evaluation and attitude to the surrounding world. Utterance that has been said expresses either real or unreal, need or possibility, necessity or volition. Furthermore, modality is realized on different levels such as phonetic (word stress and intonation), lexico-grammatical (modal verbs), grammatical and on the level of the text. It is generally thought that objective modality is an obligatory part of every utterance. It expresses the attitude of the utterance has been said to reality in the meaning of real or unreal. Subjective modality contrary to the objective is an additional feature of the utterance and is realized with the help of word order, intonation, lexical repetitions, modal verbs and expressions. Evaluation is a general linguistic category peculiar to all functional styles but is observed in all of them differently. Evaluation is a type of subjective modality. Subjective modality turns out to be a problem for translation, it is hard to reproduce it in a target language, because the translator/author has his/her own intentions, emotions and standards of ethics. This type of modality is also called author’s modality. Modality is a category of linguistic meaning having to do with the expression of possibility and necessity. A modalized sentence locates an underlying proposition in the space of possibilities which are worth studying. Moreover, the topic of modality is characterized by rich empirical detail, considerable cross-linguistic variation, and intriguing theoretical issues.