Le interrogazioni scritte in lingua tedesca

The paper aims at identifying similarities and differences among three realisations of a text genre in German: parliamentary questions submitted to the national parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundestag) as well as original and translated questions tabled by MEPs in the European Parliament. The research questions concerned a) the influence of the national and supranational institutional context on various features of the text genre, and b) the presence of ‘translationese’ in the translated texts. After providing and briefly discussing some lexicometric data, the contribution focuses on the lexical and textual level, notably on nouns (compound nouns and nomina actionis), adjectives (with positive or negative connotation) and connectives (conjunctive and pronominal adverbs). The quantitative-qualitative analysis has shown substantial similarities between the original and translated EU questions, thus confirming the role played by the institutional context. On the contrary, the results refuted some initial assumptions concerning the translated texts.