The ELFentextualizated legal discourse and its accessibility to international recipients

Abstract

This paper examines the intralingual and interlingual reformulations of a selected corpus of extracts from the eu Directive on international protection and the Decreto Flussi, defining the number of nonEuropean workers who can enter Italy. The retextualizations are meant to increase the original discourse’s accessibility to international receivers by applying the ‘ELFentextualization’ model. This was devised at the University of Salento as a tool allowing students and mediators to work with text analysis and reproduction by means of English as a common language and hence improve their competence. In addition, the renderings also aim to pursue the recipients’ ‘legal empowerment’ by expanding the addressees’ comprehension of their rights and duties in a foreign country. The analysis of the retextualizations details the actualization of the three phases of ‘elfentextualization’: (i) interpretation of the original versions; (ii) identification of the core of the authors’ intentionality; and (iii) production of target versions.