Markova Y. Translation adaptation of means of expressing modality in international legal discourse (based on Ukrainian translations of soft law documents).

The dissertation develops a new approach to translation adaptation in the institutional discourse based on Ukrainian translations of English-language soft law - international texts of a quasi-law nature, which have legal consequences, but are not universally binding and include hybrid genres, combining international obligations with the political positions. The novelty of the approach lies in the study of the adaptation of the modality in the institutional discourse as determined by the transformations of the illocutionary force of speech acts in the target text compared to the source text. The study introduces the concept of illocutionary pragmatic adaptation of modality as a type of translation reproduction of the original text, which consists in changing the type of modal meanings or their intensification / de-intensification in the translation text, which is based on a change in the degree of illocutionary power of direct and indirect speech acts. The change, weakening or strengthening of the illocutionary force of directive, commissive, assertive, declarative, and expressive acts affect the obligatory, commissive, permissive, epistemic, dynamic, and evidential modalities of the text of the Ukrainian translations compared to the English-language original texts. A comprehensive research methodology involves a set of interdisciplinary special methods of linguistics, including comparative translation analysis, the methods of linguistic genealogy and the theory of speech acts, in the aspect of differentiating direct and indirect acts and analyzing the conditions for their successful implementation as well as the elements of componential, semiotic and discourse analysis, in combination with the text-interpretive method. It is proved that the modality of the soft law texts and their illocutionary adaptation are determined by the specifics of such documents, which are both legal and quasi-legal differing in the degree of their binding force, which can affect the strengthening or, on the contrary, the de-intensification of modal meanings, a change in the level of «involvement» of the parties to the document.