Mediated Language in Non-native Speaker Texts from the European Commission

Abstract

The aim of the present article is to examine the English of non-edited texts from the European Commission and compare it with that of the texts edited by the DGT Editing Service. The interest of this is to investigate editing as a process of mediation, during which language undergoes a process of rewriting and revision wrought by someone who did not write the text. Lefevere (1992: 9) includes editing in his list of rewriting activities, alongside translation, historiography, anthologizing and criticism, and rewriting is interpreted by Ulrych and Anselmi (2008) as a means of mediation, which is extremely important for texts of all types, since mediated texts are actually the form of texts which most readers encounter. In the present paper, mediated texts are investigated in a comparative light, both against the same text previous to their revision, and against the general reference corpus of the BNC.