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.
