Translation Techniques and Accuracy of Modality Expressions in the Articles of Association

The translation of legal documents requires a high level of accuracy because even minor shifts in meaning may affect legal interpretation and force. Among the linguistic features in legal texts, modality expressions play a crucial role in expressing obligation, permission, prohibition, and legal necessity. This study aims to identify the types of modality expressions, analyze the translation techniques used, and evaluate the translation accuracy of modality expressions in the Articles of Association of a public company. This study employed a descriptive qualitative approach using a bilingual Indonesian-English legal document obtained from the company’s official website. Data were collected through content analysis and validated using Focus Group Discussion (FGD) with expert raters. The analysis was based on Lyons’ (1977) theory of modality, Molina and Albir’s (2002) translation techniques, and Nababan et al.’s (2012) translation accuracy assessment model. The findings reveal that two types of modality expressions were identified, namely deontic modality (98.68%) and alethic modality (1.32%), indicating the predominance of normative functions in corporate legal texts. Two translation techniques were identified: established equivalent (92.1%) and literal translation (7.9%), with established equivalent being the dominant technique. The accuracy assessment shows that 71.05% of the data were categorized as accurate, 7.89% as less accurate, and 21.05% as inaccurate, resulting in an average accuracy score of 2.5. The study concludes that the dominant use of established equivalent contributes to preserving the legal meaning of modality expressions, although several translations still contain inaccuracies that may weaken legal precision.