This volume is a study into the norms that come into play in the translation of European Union legislation. With a focus on expressions of modality, the study adopts a corpus-based Descriptive Translation Studies approach to analyse the translation strategies used in a bilingual English/Italian parallel corpus of European Union legislation and identify the most frequent translational patterns. The book outlines the principles at the basis of the multilingual policy at the European Union and provides a detailed outline of the context in which the drafting and translation processes take place as a key to understanding the translational choices. The impact of sometimes contrasting factors such as the conventions of legal drafting at the European Union and those within the target culture, the principle of equal authenticity and the attention to the quality and readability of legislative texts is revealed in the analysis. Evidence in support of the theories concerning translation universals is also found and their implications for EU legal translation are discussed. The results lead to the formulation of several hypotheses as regards the norms governing the translation of EU legislative texts. The book also reflects on the impact that the translational choices have on the development of European Union legal language as an independent variety. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of Legal Translation Studies and Linguistics, as well as practising translators.

Francesca L. Seracini, holds an MA in Foreign Languages and Literatures and a Ph.D. in Linguistic Sciences. She is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. Her research concerns legal language and translation, phraseology, corpus linguistics and professional communication. Her research is characterized by a methodological approach based on discourse analysis integrated with quantitative investigation in the tradition of corpus linguistics. Her publications include the volume Nuovi media e discorso politico. I blog nelle elezioni presidenziali americane [New Media and Political Discourse. Blogs in US Presidential Elections] (2014) and the journal article “Representation of Knowledge about Opioids between Criminalization and Medicalization” (2020).