Migration in Translation: the role of terminology and trans-editing in shaping the crisis in EU Institutions

The present thesis focuses on the role and impact that terminology and translation had on shaping the Migration Crisis for the media and citizens in the EU, and reconstructs the European Parliament information flow through translation, by exploring its translation policies, strategies, and organisational structures within this field. The study is structured in two phases and has, respectively, two aims: to provide an overview of Migration terminology in EU Institutions and explore its translation into institutional texts; and to investigate the role of the “unknown agents” (Schäffner 2014) involved in the communication process and the translation strategies implemented. The first phase deals with terminology and institutional translation and uses Corpus Linguistics as a methodology. As the analysis develops on two levels, monolingual and multilingual, the software Sketch Engine was chosen to comply with both. Term occurrences and patterns of use were investigated in the EUR-LEX Corpus 2/16 EN and in a compiled corpus of press releases published between 2010 and 2016, while the parallel corpora function was used to observe term equivalents in English and Italian. The second phase investigates translators and press officers in their institutional settings and employs ethnographic methods such as observation practices, interviews and round tables, to find possible correlations between the translation processes and the products. The research results show how terminology and translation had an impact on the portrayals of “migrants” in institutional texts and how they simultaneously evolved with the legislative progress made by EU institutions in the field of Immigration and Asylum. The practices of linguistic ethnography conducted with terminologists and press officers at the European Parliament enabled us to find the correlations between the texts and their producers and to contextualise the corpus results obtained. The research shows that there are large differences in how translation is employed by translators and press officers in EU institutions, and that strategies affecting terminology and trans-editing practices are largely interdependent with the communication purposes, the targets and the political voices representing the institution. This thesis concludes by discussing the complex and conflictual relationship between specialised terminology and general language in the narration of migrants and refugees in institutional texts, and the instability and “fuzziness” of migration terms that labelled thirty years of Immigration and Asylum policies in EU Institutions.