This study aimed 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 taking place in the translation process: shifts in the strength of modal verbs and those in the means of modal expression. The lack of research concerning the contrastive analysis of the translation of modal verbs (and modality in general) in the Croatian language served as the rationale for writing the present thesis. For the purpose of the analysis, a total of 520 randomly selected sample sentences containing modal verbs must, should, ought to, and may were extracted from legal and literary corpora and aligned with the same number of their Croatian translations. The data were then analyzed to elucidate the motivators for the translator’s employment of a translation causing a shift in modality in order to detect how such translation solutions reflect the general characteristics of the two genres regarding modality in terms of their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features influencing the translation process. The results of the study demonstrated that shifts in the strength of modal verbs were more frequent in the legal corpus, primarily due to the existence of a strong contextual framework of rules and regulations in which modals were embedded, drawing on its strength. Shifts in the means of modal expression were more prominent in the literary corpus, primarily due to the great relevance of epistemic modal verbs to this genre, whose syntactic properties in the target language prompted the translator to avoid using them for stylistic reasons.