Translation Universals in Legal Translation: A Corpus­-based Study of Explicitation and Simplification

Research into legal translation has drawn attention to the potential effects that universal ten­ dencies in translation could have on translated legal texts (Biel 2010; Prieto Ramos 2014; Pontrandolfo 2020), with particular regard to accuracy and readability. This paper takes sim­ plification and explicitation into consideration and investigates the impact of these two ten­ dencies on translated legislative texts. The analysis was carried out on a parallel corpus of EU legislative texts translated from English into Italian and a reference corpus of national non­translated legislation. A corpus­based approach was adopted with a view to providing quantitative data that could be indicative of a tendency to simplification and explicitation in the translated texts. A subsequent qualitative analysis carried out on the parallel corpus ex­ amined the shifts between original and translated legislative texts, with a focus on the linguistic features that point to an increased level of simplification and explicitation in the translations. The results of the analysis were compared to data obtained from the reference corpus in or­ der to identify those elements that characterise the translated legislative texts differently from non­translated legislation. The results revealed that the translated texts tend to be more expli­ cit than the source texts at a lexical and morphosyntactic level. Evidence of simplification was also found in the tendency to omit unnecessary repetitions, to avoid complex sentence struc­ tures and to prefer the active voice. The paper discusses the implications of simplification and explicitation in EU translated legislation: while they contribute to clarity and readability, they also reduce vagueness and limit interpretation.