Hate Speech, incitamento all’odio, incitación al odio: EU Parallel Corpora, Legal Discourse, Metadiscourse and Translation

Abstract

According to Sandrelli (2019, p. 111), “the multilingual co-drafting process produces equally authentic language versions of the same document in all the EU official languages. However, what actually happens in practice is that EU legislation is drafted in one language (English, in most cases) and is then translated into all the other ones”. Starting from this assumption, the aim of this paper is to investigate a series of hate speech-related EU documents in order to explore certain features of hate discourse and hate discourse-related phraseology, metadiscourse and translation issues in the English, Italian and Spanish versions of the texts. The quantitative and qualitative analysis will look at the use of peculiar language constructions in the three languages in relation, among other features, to hateful rhetoric, discrimination, violent behaviour, intolerance, harassment, gender inequalities, extremism and racism. Additionally, the features of metadiscourse (Hyland, 2019 [2005]) will be scrutinised in the three languages in order to ascertain whether and to what extent they function as rhetorical markers conferring a persuasive rather than merely an informative and prescriptive character to the texts under consideration. The parallel corpora include documents which date back to 2021. They appear to have as their underlying aim that of disseminating and circulating hate discourse-related counteractions, good practices and procedures in controversial cultural contexts and environments, especially those associated with such divisive matters as the safeguarding of human rights and human dignity of diverse religious, ethnic and social groups.