European English terms for Italian legal concepts: the case of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure

The translation of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure into English, published in 2014, represents a way of explaining the functioning of the Italian criminal procedure to a wide English-speaking audience. Given the different varieties of English available, the translation team chose European English as the target language of the translation. After a brief overview of the central role played by English in the European supranational and international context, the paper presents a classification of translation equivalents used for the translation of the Code and illustrates it by concrete examples. Such classification is based on two criteria, namely the availability of European English translation equivalents in the reference corpus of European documents used by the translation team and the degree of embeddedness of the underlying concept in the national legal system. The resulting classification is threefold and comprises European English translation equivalents for Italian terms designating legal concepts shared by both national and supranational/international legal systems, European English translation equivalents for Italian terms designating legal concepts embedded in the national legal system only, and Italian terms designating legal concepts embedded in the national legal system with no European English translation equivalent.