This study aims to examine the general features of the translation of English modal verbs into Croatian in legal and literary texts, with an emphasis on two kinds of shifts occurring in the translation process: shifts in the strength of modal verbs and shifts in the means of expressing modality. A lack of research on translating modal verbs (and modality in general) into Croatian serves as the rationale for conducting the present study. To this end, a total of 520 randomly selected English sentences containing the modal verbs must, should, ought to, and may were extracted from legal and literary corpora and placed alongside their Croatian translations. The extracts were then analyzed in an attempt to explain the motivation for employing those translation strategies that had produced a shift in modality. This was done to find out how those strategies reflect the general characteristics of the two genres regarding modality in terms of their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features that influence the translation process. The analysis revealed that shifts in the strength of the aforementioned modal verbs were more frequent in the legal corpus, primarily because of the strict framework of rules and regulations legal discourse comes with. This framework affects the strength of modal expressions. Shifts in the means of expressing modality were more frequent in the literary corpus, primarily because of a high frequency of epistemic modal verbs, whose syntactic properties in the target language had prompted the translator to avoid using them for stylistic reasons.