The Translatability of Indonesian Modality into English

Translation is a bilingual activity and the languages involved in translation have their own lexico-grammatical features. Modality which can be categorized into modalization and modulation refers to grammatical realization of interpersonal meaning. Systems of modality are different among languages and these differences become important to be well handled in translation. This research is focused on the translatability of modality from Indonesian into English. It investigates the effects of translation strategies applied by the translator to the contextual meaning of target text that is identified and analyzed from the perspectives of type, value, and orientation of modality based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. The result shows that modality in Indonesian can be rendered into English. Shifts due to the value or orientation of modality cause differences of the contextual meanings between Indonesian and English texts.