Simplifying EU legislative texts: the contribution of translation

This paper investigates the strategies adopted in the translation of EU legislation in the light of the requirements concerning the quality in EU laws and of the various types of constraints influencing the translators’ choices. The analysis is based on a bilingual parallel corpus of EU legislation in English and in Italian and takes the translation of the passive voice as a case in point. The results are compared with data from a reference corpus of Italian national laws and reveal that the translated laws tend to be clearer and more readable compared to the original laws in English. The findings also provide evidence in support of the simplification and normalisation hypotheses in translation.