Un approccio corpus-driven al linguaggio dell’immigrazione

Abstract

Abstract – Cultural and linguistic mediation has a role of utmost importance in the process of the integration of migrants into new communities and systems. The activity of mediation starts with and is realized through language, which is the main and most important means of communication between the members of a society and the medium through which reality is experienced and reflected upon. Mediators operating in immigration contexts are, therefore, requested to possess high-level linguistic and cultural skills in order to facilitate migrants’ access to services and benefits such as healthcare, school, or to the hosting country’s legal system. However, the linguistic training of mediators has to focus on a language which is characterised by terminological, syntactic and stylistic complexity being a combination of different languages such as legal language, language of medicine, or of the school system and which is strictly interrelated with the notion of register variation and genre features. This article aims to analyse the language of the Italian website Portale dell’Immigrazione supported by the Italian Ministry of the Interior in collaboration with Poste Italiane (Post Office) and Anci (the national association of communes) dealing with procedures and guidance for visa and permit applications, the language of the Immigrazione e Asilo section on the official website of the Italian Interior Ministry and the language of a section of the British Home Office website, UK Visas and Immigration whose role is to make decisions about who has the right to visit or stay in the country. The texts available in the above mentioned websites will be collected in two comparable corpora, that is to say two collections of texts having in common topic, text types and communicative function. These corpora will be analysed by means of a piece of software for linguistic analysis with the aim of identifying the most frequent words and their patterns of usage in each language and a set of translation equivalents across the two languages. The approach and the tools used in the analyses will prove to be valid in the training of linguistic mediators with important implications on the mediators’ level of specialisation, fluency and pragmatic accuracy.