Studies on European integration: a linguistic "venture" worth the effort.

Three years after the journal Studi sull’integrazione europea was founded in 2006, the editors thought that it would be wise to start a new “adventure” and publish the abstracts of the papers submitted to the journal not only in Italianbut also in English. The idea sounded timely for an academic journal which, despite being published in Italy, aims at being international and European. When I was asked to take on this task and be responsible for the linguistic part of the journal, I accepted with enthusiasm, yet well aware of the difficulty of the highly responsible job. Indeed, I thought of it more as a “venture”, rather than an “adventure”, borrowing this word from the Preface of the ill-fated European Constitution where we read that “Convinced that, thus ‘United in diversity’, Europe offers the peoples of Europe the best chance of pursuing the great venture which makes of it a special area of human hope”. The Italian version of the Lisbon Treaty speaks of avventura in this regard, but I reckon that “venture” serves the purpose well, indicating “a project or activity which is new, exciting and difficult”, and we know well that translating the acquis is both exciting and difficult. Translating the acquis communautaire has been described as “the linguistic equivalent of climbing Mount Everest”: it is a massive and daunting undertaking, where the translation of both words and phrases demands a sustained effort that must be based on sound linguistic, terminological and technical input. Translating is an exacting art, and translating legal language, European legal language in the case in point, is even a greater venture because it has developed its own terminology and legislative style as a separate genre. European texts very often look and feel odd and unfamiliar to native speakers in the Member States, in all languages. In this paper I will describe the several resources that have guided me in the revision process of the abstracts written by Italian scholars working mainly in the legal sector, in particular European law and international law, but also scholars and researchers who investigate other fields, but whose common interest is the European Union in all its multifaceted aspects.