Intralingual translation in expert-to-lay public communication: strategies and recurrent features in informative legal texts in the digital environment

Effective communication and addressing the information needs of individuals are pivotal for institutions to establish trust and credibility. As rules and regulations directly impact people's daily lives, it's imperative to communicate clearly with the general public about their rights and responsibilities. This chapter investigates the process of adapting legal documents to make them understandable for non-experts, as a form of intralingual translation in the digital environment The study aims to pinpoint the strategies employed at a linguistic and multimodal level to simplify legislative texts and restructure their content. A comparison is drawn between two sets of texts: one comprising UK Coronavirus legislation and the other consisting of informative webpages from the UK government's official site that explain the same laws. Employing a Corpus-based Translation Studies approach, the research identifies the distinct features that differentiate these adapted texts. Findings reveal various simplifications made in the adapted versions, including omissions, additions, and the substitution of technical terms with informal language. Additionally, the incorporation of hyperlinks in the adapted texts offers readers the flexibility to choose the depth of information they wish to explore without increasing textual complexity.