ABSTRACT
Being able to communicate effectively and meet people’s information needs is crucially important for institutions to establish credibility and trust. Given that rules and regulations impact on people’s everyday lives, clear communication to the lay public concerning their rights and obligations is key. The present chapter investigates the adaptation of legislative texts for communication to a non-specialized audience as a form of intralingual translation in the digital environment. The aim of the study is to identify the strategies that are used, at both a linguistic and a multimodal level, to reword the legislative texts and to reorganize content. Two corpora are compared: A corpus of UK Coronavirus legislation and a corpus of informative webpages from the institutional website of the UK government popularizing the same legislative texts. A Corpus-based Translation Studies approach is used to investigate the distinguishing features that characterize these mediated texts. The results show that the original texts are simplified at different levels. The changes concern omissions and additions, as well as the use of hyponyms in the target texts. Technical terms are replaced by colloquial, often less formal, expressions. Moreover, the numerous hyperlinks in the target texts allow readers to customize the level of depth of the information they want to access without adding complexity to the text itself.
