Multilingual dissemination and translation of European Parliament's "Topics": A Corpus-based contrastive study of English and Italian articles

This dissertation investigates linguistic and translational patterns in English–Italian translation within the institutional context of the European Union. Drawing on Translation Studies, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and Corpus Linguistics, the study analyses a bilingual parallel corpus compiled from the European Parliament’s “Topics” webpages. The research aims to identify and quantify recurrent structural, lexical, and discourse-level phenomena that characterise the translation of English source texts (STs) into Italian target texts (TTs), with particular attention to textual expansion, lexical variation, Theme–Rheme organisation, and translation techniques. The quantitative findings reveal a systematic tendency toward expansion in the Italian texts, including higher token counts, longer sentences, and increased syntactic elaboration. Lexical density and type–token ratio (TTR) analyses demonstrate that while English exhibits greater informational compactness, Italian displays higher morphological variation and lexical diversity. Qualitative analysis identifies frequent instances of Theme–Rheme modification, addition and omission, non-isomorphic sentence alignment, nominalisation, loanword retention, and word-order alterations within the rheme. These patterns reflect both cross-linguistic structural differences and translator-driven strategies such as explicitation, reformulation, and transposition. The study concludes that Italian translations, while faithful to source-text meaning, are shaped by a combination of typological factors, institutional conventions, and communicative norms within the EU context. The results contribute to a deeper understanding of translation behaviour in multilingual institutional environments, highlighting the interplay between linguistic structure, translation strategies, and discourse organisation. Limitations and directions for further research are also discussed.