German sollen and Spanish deber

Abstract

This chapter examines the relationship between the German modal verb sollen and the Spanish verb deber through a corpus-based analysis of mutual correspondence (MC) and translation bias (TB). Using a dataset of 200 aligned sentences from the German–Spanish Parallel Corpus (PaGeS), it analyzes the extent to which both verbs function as translation equivalents and assesses the adequacy of the selected translations. The results show a moderate degree of intertranslatability, but also a clear asymmetry between the two translation directions. While sollen is frequently rendered as deber , this solution is not always accurate or idiomatic in Spanish. The findings have implications for contrastive analysis, translation practice, and translator training.