A Critical Discourse Analysis and reformulation approach to the Dublin III Regulation

Abstract

Abstract – This study is the result of an interest in Critical Discourse Analysis applied to the legal discourse of immigration. Its aim is to analyze the features characterizing the Dublin III Regulation (which is criticized because it fails in speeding up the analysis of asylum applications and in clearly assigning responsibility to a specific EU State) by applying Critical Discourse Analysis and taking into account the different linguistic points of view readers may use while conceptualizing a message. During the process of law drafting, legal experts are influenced by their own cultural mental schemata. This relevant, yet often ignored aspect of law making is a cause of difficulty which makes western legal texts inaccessible to receivers with different socio-cognitive schemata. Unfortunately, all the linguistic and syntactical features characterizing legal texts are justified by the fact that laws belong to the category of specialized discourse, which has its own features which diverge from everyday language. As it will be discussed, some of the most common features used in western legal texts are alien to migrants, therefore, after pragmatically analyzing the Regulation, this study wants to provide a possible and more accessible reformulation of the legal text, aiming to make the Dublin III Regulation more accessible to the multicultural audience it addresses. To verify the accessibility of the intralingual translation, both the original Articles and the reformulation have been submitted to a group of migrants.