Abstract: Law, the set of formal documents prescribing legal rights and obligations, plays an important role in guaranteeing the sound and steady development of the entire nation. Even a minor misunderstanding of a single word may lead to serious legal issues. In this sense, the translation of these legal provisions is quite a demanding job. “Shall” and “may” are the most frequently used modal words in legal English. Then this paper focuses on the comparison of “shall” and “may” on the basis of English versions of two legal documents, namely The General Principles of the Contract Law of the People’s Republic of China and The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. Legal provisions fall into four major categories: authoritative provisions, injunctive provisions, forbidding provisions and descriptive provisions. With the discussion of specific linguistic features of legal provision, the paper compares the usage of “shall” and “may” in common language and that in legal provisions, and summarizes different translation methods of these two modal verbs. 

Key words: legal provisions; modal verbs; translation

摘要：法律规定了人们的权利和义务，以此保障社会健康稳定的发展。法律条文中即使是一字一词的错误理解都可以引发严重的法律后果，因此法律文本的翻译需要更多的斟酌。本文选取在法律英语中频繁使用的两个情态动词“shall”和“may”为研究点，以《中华人民共和国合同法总则》和《中华人民共和国香港特别行政区基本法》为例进行比较。根据法律条文的四种不同分类，即授权性法律条文、命令性法律条文、禁止性法律条文以及非规范性法律条文，本文探讨了法律条文的语言特点，对比了“shall”和“may”在普通英语及法律英语中的用法，并归纳了法律条文中“shall”和“may”的翻译方法。 

关键词：法律条文；情态动词；翻译