The author takes two of the strongest recent analyses of SHOULD and MUST and asks whether they can be applied to modals in German. The ultimate goal is a framework for modality which will have cross-linguistic validity instead of being tailor-made for English. The method, which is part of a larger contrastive project, is to examine the translation equivalents of the English modals in the INTERSECT English-German translation corpus. The authors find that MUST and MÜSSEN can be treated in similar ways, but that this is not the case for SHOULD and SOLLEN. They tentatively conclude that the analysis of Larreya and Rivière (1999) has fewer disadvantages than that of Groefsema (1995), though both have problems when extended beyond English.