Making national immigration and asylum case law accessible to a non-Italian audience: The role of intra-lingual translation

This paper focuses on the Italian case law developed over disputes concerning the rejection of applications for asylum or subsidiary protection by the Supreme Court of Cassation, i.e. the highest court of appeal in Italy. More specifically, it presents TrIACLE (Translated Immigration & Asylum Case Law in Europe), a translation project conducted at the University of Trieste whose underlying idea is that the monolingual tradition of Italian courts constitutes a limit to the dissemination of legal knowledge and the circulation of ‘food for thought’ beyond national boundaries. Therefore, TrIACLE’s aim is to translate in English a selection of the most significant and recent judicial decisions of the Court of Cassation related to asylum and international protection in order to make them available to a wider audience of non-Italian speakers. Although the standards applied in these decisions rely on EU and international law available in English, this type of translation is made highly challenging by, on the one hand, the fact that the applicable national legislation in the cases under examination is in Italian and, on the other, the peculiarities of Italian judicial drafting (Cortelazzo, 1995; Ondelli, 2014; Rega, 1997; Scarpa & Riley, 1999). First this paper describes the interdisciplinary translation team in charge of the project, the methodological choices that it had to make as well as the work processes that were followed in order to overcome the challenges posed by this type of inter-lingual translation, which are due not only to the culture-boundedness of the legal system underlying the source texts but also to the often convoluted nature of the language used by Italian judges. The second part of the paper presents concrete examples to show the fundamental role of the preliminary intra-lingual translation performed by the team members in the pre-translation phase. Indeed, making national case law intelligible to an international and not clearly defined audience, frequently requires various forms of simplification of the source texts, which are only possible through the close collaboration of field and language experts.