MODALITY AND LEGAL TRANSLATION FROM SPANISH TO MAPUZUGUN

THE CASE OF DEONTIC CONSTRUCTIONS

Abstract

This study analyzes deontic modal constructions in legal translations from Spanish to Mapuzugun based on the NORZUGU bilingual corpus. Thirty bilingual texts from the Chilean legal field were examined to describe the morphosyntactic strategies Mapuche translators use to express deontic modality. The results reveal the predominant use of the construction “müle-y + possessive + nominalized verb with the -a-el suffixs”, though variants with different verbs in the main clause, such as felen, nien, and gen, are also documented. The study also documents variation phenomena not previously reported in the literature, both in the verb of the main sentence and in the nominalized verb.