Mediated Language in non-native speaker texts from the European Commission

These paper considers examples of mediated language in non-native speaker texts in European Commission documents. Edited texts are compared with non-edited ones in order to see whether editing can be considered a form of language mediation. These texts are subjected to further comparison with general reference material from the British National Corpus. Some preliminary conclusions show that most editing concerns objective criteria such as grammar and house style, though personal subjective modifications are also detected, highlighting the seemingly conflicting strategies of concision and explicitation.