Speaker
Description
This study examines the translation of modality in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), particularly Halliday’s conceptualization of modality as a resource for expressing obligation, permission, and authority. This article shows how modal verbs such as “shall” and “may”, together with legal expressions including “subject to” and “in accordance with”, are translated from English into Vietnamese. The findings show that the modal verb “shall”, which conventionally signals binding obligation in legal drafting, is translated in ways that emphasize futurity rather than obligation, thereby weakening the prescriptive force of the original text. Likewise, the rendering of “may” occasionally blurs the distinction between legal permission and possibility. Therefore, such translational issues have important challenges of achieving functional equivalence in legal translation. Through the results, we consider its implications for Legal English teaching in Vietnam in contextual interpretation and bilingual contrastive analysis.
Keywords: legal modality, United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), functional equivalence, contrastive analysis
Biography
Nguyen Thi Cam Nhung is a Lieutenant Colonel, Senior Teacher at the People’s Police College II, Vietnam. She is currently a Ph. D candidate at the Linguistics Department at Ho Chi Minh City University of Social Sciences and Humanities – USSH-VNUHCM. She received her MA in Theory and methodology of English language teaching in 2019. Her research interests are teaching English skills, innovative teaching methods, and studying comparative and contrastive linguistics. She has presented and written some articles on these topics.
| Affiliate type | Vietnamese public school |
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