Äta tårta bör man …

The Swedish modal verbs böra and töra are very often lost in translation. This is an overview of 100 years of translations of these verbs in fictional texts from Swedish to Czech, using InterCorp version 11 from the Czech National Corpus in comparison with dictionaries from the 20th and 21st centuries as well as some findings from selected Swedish Korp corpora. When comparing the corpus results with some of the larger, and a few smaller, dictionaries, it becomes clear why any new Swedish–Czech dictionary would need to take corpus findings into account. A brief comparison between fiction and non-fiction also shows that especially the verb töra is used more often in e.g. instructional and administrative text types, which leaves room for improvement both in research and in lexicography.