A critical discourse analysis of cases of ELF reformulation of European and Italian legal texts on migration

Abstract

The present chapter focuses on a parallel corpus of legal texts from the EU and the recently issued Italian legal text dealing with Migration, the so called “Decreto Sicurezza bis” (“Safety Decree”), of June 2019, and it aims to point out the textual difficulties arising from the interpretation of such legal documents. This is all the more true if we think of the technical limitations and practical difficulties that reading a legal text may pose to a layperson using English as a lingua franca (ELF). Unlike previous studies dealing with the same topic of Immigration (Provenzano 2008), here the focus is on a small corpus from the EU and an Italian text, with the aim of defining cultural similarities at the level of text production. Furthermore, the texts are also relevant to the receivers and, yet, they are often likely to cause unintelligibility. Hence, both the EU texts and the Italian one are here submitted to a process of reformulation, as preliminary to the translation stage, in order to make them more accessible to international receivers (Widdowson 1984).