LEX.CH.IT: A Corpus for Micro-Diachronic Linguistic Investigations of Swiss Normative Acts in Italian

Abstract

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.

Multilingual legislation and plain language

“…To answer these three research questions, I adopted current research methodologies drawn from the field of corpus-based legal and institutional translation studies and linguistics. First, I compiled LEX.CH.IT, an ad hoc corpus of Swiss legislation in Italian that comprises all federal acts enacted between 1974 and 2018, for a total of 366 texts and over 1.1 million tokens (Canavese 2019). I also built a trilingual aligned sample of 17 texts and approximately 30,000 words per language.…”

Translation and clarity in Swiss multilingual legislation: A qualitative study on textuality

“…However, it was not until very recently that the first corpus-based projects started to appear. One of them, described in Canavese (2019), aims for instance to investigate the level of linguistic clarity of Swiss federal legislation in Italian with LEX.CH.IT, an ad hoc corpus of all Swiss federal acts from the nineteen-seventies to the present day.…”