This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Institutional Translation and Interpreting: Assessing Practices and Managing for Quality, edited
The aim of this paper is to present LEX.CH.IT, a corpus for micro-diachronic linguistic investigations of Swiss normative acts in Italian. Italian has a peculiar position as an official minority translation language within the Swiss institutional system. Until now, few studies have focused on Swiss legal Italian, but the academic interest has been growing over the last two decades. In order to further expand on research in this field, resources such as corpora are fundamental. This is why LEX.CH.IT has been compiled. This corpus was originally created in the context of a doctoral research project, which will be briefly outlined in this paper. The main goals of the project are to determine whether clarity is a feature of Swiss legislation in Italian, whether there have been relevant evolutions over the last five decades and to assess the role of translation for a clear legislation. In the future, LEX.CH.IT could also be useful for a number of other projects aiming to shed light on the features of this language variety.
Debate around clear legal language has become very prolific in recent years. This especially applies to multilingual contexts, where clarity is crucial to ensuring the equivalence of equally binding language versions. Clarity is a multifaceted concept that can be analysed through different lenses. While several studies have tackled clarity from the lexical and terminological perspective, textuality remains a largely under-investigated area. This paper sets out to illustrate that different concepts of text linguistics can be extremely useful for investigating multilingual legislation and its level of comprehensibility. To this aim, a qualitative pilot study was designed. It examines a sample of Swiss federal legislative acts in their Italian, French and German versions and tries to reveal recurrent micro-textual aspects that help illustrate how translation can influence text comprehensibility. It was found that the three language versions often formulate the same legal provision using different linguistic structures. Slight changes, for instance in thematic structure, position of adverbials or use of punctuation, can create a canonical and more comprehensible formulation in the translated texts, without hampering equivalence at the content level. In this respect, it is key that drafters of legislation and translators are aware of the relevance and potential of textuality to ensuring a high level of clarity in multilingual legislation.
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