Spanish Equivalences of German Modal Verbs. Approach to Translation

Abstract

This work aims to present a proposal of equivalences of German and Spanish modal verbs from a semantic point of view. Firstly, we see how modal verbs work and are classified according to the fact that these verbs express objective or subjective modality in German. Once we have considered the theoretical framework about German language, we expose the idea of the existence of modal verbs in Spanish and their possible classification according to objective and subjective modality. The problem arises when we see the controversial debate about the concept of Spanish modal verbs and their classification. Therefore, we expose verbal periphrasis in Spanish and, later, we show a small corpus in German from different journalistic texts in order to analyse subjective and objective modality in German and compare it with their periphrastic equivalents in Spanish.