La riformulazione in inglese del discorso legale italiano come processo di ‘ELFentextualization’

Abstract

This paper introduces a new model defined ELFentextualization , devised for the English reformulation of the Italian legal discourse in the field of Migration. It is meant as a pedagogical and practical tool that can help intercultural linguistic mediators increase their competence at the time of analysing and reproducing source texts for an audience of non-native English speakers. In particular, our model is adopted here for the retextualization into English as a ‘lingua franca’ (ELF) of a number of extracts from the ‘Bossi-Fini’ law and ‘Testo unico sull’immigrazione’, which indicate the actions that migrants have to follow to request residence document. After illustrating the theoretical grounds of the ELFentextualization process, this paper will examine the selected corpus of English retextualizations of Italian legal discourse. The comparison between the original and ‘ELFentextualized’ versions will exemplify that the latter are elaborated after an initial phase of ‘text analysis’, which is meant to infer the gist of the message. The essential pieces of information are then reconstructed by resorting to lexical and syntactic simplification, as well as to the macrorules for text summarization. Finally, this paper enquires into the initial phases of a reception study of the examined reformulations, which will help discuss the lingua-franca connotation of the English uses in the texts under examination.