What happened when "shall" was translated as "podrá"

The pattern repeats often enough among legal translators to have earned its own shorthand: a contract drafted in English uses "shall" in a delivery, deadline, or payment clause, and the Spanish translation renders it as «podrá» (may) instead of «deberá» (shall). The difference looks small. It isn't.

"The supplier shall deliver within 30 days" creates an enforceable obligation: the supplier is legally bound to deliver within that window, and failing to do so gives the other party a right to claim. «El proveedor podrá entregar en 30 días» (translated back: "the supplier may deliver within 30 days") describes discretion: the supplier can deliver then, but nothing in the text requires it. When that contract ends up in dispute, the party who relied on the obligation discovers that, in the translated version, it never existed.

Why this happens

"Shall" has an ambiguous use in everyday English, where it sometimes carries a weaker, more intention-like sense. But in Anglo-American contract drafting, "shall" is the word reserved specifically to express an enforceable obligation; "may" is reserved for discretion. Machine translation, or a translator without legal training, tends to pair "shall" with courteous or probability-flavored verb forms in Spanish, instead of the obligational imperative that contract law requires.

What we do differently

On every contract, we first identify which clauses contain modal verbs with legal effect (shall, may, must, will) and decide their translation based on the clause's legal function, not the word's most common translation. "Shall" is consistently translated as «deberá» when it creates an obligation; "may" as «podrá» when it describes discretion. That consistency is documented in the project glossary, so it doesn't shift from one clause to the next, or from one document to another within the same file.