Editing Specialized Texts in English - LED Edizioni Universitarie

Amanda C. Murphy – Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano

Editing Specialized Texts in English
A corpus-assisted analysis. II Edition

Collana: «Traduzione - Testi e Strumenti»
14,5 × 21 cm - pagg. 98 - 2012 - € 23,00
ISBN 978-88-7916-613-3

CONTENTS: Acknowledgements - Preface - CHAPTER 1. LANGUAGE AND TEXTS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION INSTITUTIONS. 1. The EU: a multilingual society: 1.1. An increasingly multicultural, multilingual society – 1.2. Languages in the EU in 2008 – 1.3. Multilingualism in practice: the Translation Services – 1.4. The dominant working language: English – 2. The nature of texts in the European Union: 2.1. Hybridity – 2.2. From one draft to another: the process of mediation – 2.3. The concern for quality drafting – 3. Tools for clear writing: 3.1. The Office for Official Publications and the Interinstitutional Style Guide – 3.2. The Joint Practical Guide of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission – 3.3. The Manual of Precedents – 3.4. LegisWrite – 3.5. Writing Guides produced by Translators into English – 3.5.1. Fight the Fog – 3.5.2. The English Style Guide – 3.5.3. Tips on writing English – 4. A profile of the Editing Service in DGT – CHAPTER 2. THE EUROCOM CORPUS: CONTEXT AND CONTENTS. 1. An empirical approach to language description: 1.1. Background to the research: types of corpora – 1.2. The EuroCom corpus – 1.2.1. Provenance of EuroCom texts – 1.2.2. Text types within the European Union institutions – 1.2.3. Primary and Secondary legislation – 1.2.4. Documents produced by the Commission – 1.2.5. Types of EuroCom texts – 2. A word on genre and text type – 3. The English of the EuroCom texts and English as a lingua franca: 3.1. Euro-English – 4. The framework of linguistic analysis – CHAPTER 3. A LEXICO-GRAMMATICAL ANALYSIS OF THE EUROCOM CORPUS. 1. From words to phrases: 1.1. Two-grams in the corpora – 1.2. Three-grams in the corpora – 1.3. Preliminary observations on edited language from the quantitative analysis – 2. Categorizing revisions and qualitative analyses: 2.1. Objective, Norm-based Revisions: Spelling, capitalisation, and punctuation – 2.2. Objective, Norm-based Revisions: Grammar – Prepositions and verbs – 2.3. Overall or Usage-based improvements: "Foggy" phraseology – 2.4. Overall or Usage-based improvements: Revising Eurospeak – 3. Regular revisions interpreted as mediation tendencies or universals: 3.1. Definitions of explicitation and implicitation in Translation Studies – 3.2. Examples of explicitation and implicitation in the EuroCom edited corpus – 3.3. Qualitative studies of explicitation and implicitation strategies – 3.4. Further quantitative analyses on edited language – Conclusions – References.

This volume examines the editing of specialised texts as practised by the Editing Unit at the Directorate- General for Translation at the European Commission in Brussels. Following a corpusassisted approach, it compares two comparable corpora of the same texts, in their non-edited and edited versions. Using quantitative techniques from corpus linguistics together with manual text analysis, the author reflects on the types of revisions that are made, of a formal, grammatical and lexical nature, and on some phraseological aspects of the edited texts. The conclusions drawn are that the written English representing supranational organizations such as the European Union institutions continues to be norm-bound, adhering to standard British English. However, traces of influences from other European languages, in terms of false friends, and certain grammatical phrases, characterise the corpus of edited texts more than reference corpora of British English. Similarly to translated language, edited language is also found to be characterised by explicitation and simplification.

Amanda C. Murphy is an Associate Professor of English Linguistics in the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan. Her research and other publications concern corpus linguistics, contrastive English and Italian linguistics, phraseology and evaluation.

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