Testing the hypothesis of “translation as a catalyst for plain legislation” on the syntactic level: a comparison of different varieties of legislative Italian
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Keywords

Legislative Italian
eurolect
Swiss Italian
syntactic complexity
readability
plain language
accessibility
corpus-based study

How to Cite

Canavese, P., & Mori, L. (2024). Testing the hypothesis of “translation as a catalyst for plain legislation” on the syntactic level: a comparison of different varieties of legislative Italian. Comparative Legilinguistics, 58, 113–150. https://doi.org/10.14746/cl.2024.58.3

Abstract

Translation is often considered as an ally of plain legal language. This corpus-based study sets out to provide empirical support for this hypothesis by comparing different varieties of legislative Italian used in a monolingual context (Italy) and in two multilingual settings (Switzerland and the European Union). The investigation relies primarily on a quantitative analysis of syntax informed by natural language processing (NLP) methods. The results suggest that translated legislation features shorter sentences, fewer nominalizations, an underuse of the passive voice, fewer non-finite clauses, less deep syntactic trees, shorter dependency links, and a preference for the SVO order with an explicit subject. Among the two multilingual contexts, Swiss legislation shows a slightly higher level of accessibility compared to EU directives. A complementary analysis using readability metrics confirms these trends. Nevertheless, in addition to the translation process in multilingual contexts, other latent external variables may have a (hardly quantifiable) impact on the level of accessibility, such as institutional language policies, legal traditions, drafting guidelines, and training programs for translators and language experts.

https://doi.org/10.14746/cl.2024.58.3
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