“Acting in accordance with the ordinary legislative procedure…”: metadiscourse in EU regulations on immigration

The ongoing Pan-European integration process has profoundly influenced the nature of European law and its development, demanding a review of “the ways of how language […] is materialized” (Gibová, 2009, p. 192). EU multilingualism is thus becoming an intricate concept since “EU translation is […] becoming the language of Europe” (Gibová, 2009, p. 192) encompassing a supranational view of the world conveyed in EU-wide legislation. Very much in line with this assumption, and taking into account the teaching experience in Specialised Translation Masters’ courses training would-be professional translators, this study examines a corpus of European Parliament Regulations on immigration.In order to understand whether dissimilarities and/or congruencies occur between the EU working language, i.e., English, and the Italian versions, the metadiscourse framework by Hyland (2005), comprising both interactive and interactional features, is used as the point of departure for the analysis of parallel texts. The Regulations produced by EU institutions and conveyed and transmitted both in English as a “procedural language” (Wagner, Bech, &Martίnez, 2012) as well as in Italian have been scrutinized both quantitatively and qualitatively, in order to draw precious pedagogical implications for translation studies and professional practice for future qualified and trained translators.