Accessibility Issues in Specialized Legal Genres on Immigration and Political Asylum. An ELF-based model

The present study aims to provide an updated and in-depth analysis of modern specialized legal genres dealing with Immigration and Political Asylum, in order to consider the main linguistic and discursive problems possibly arising in reading them and thus possibly affecting their correct interpretation. It has been assumed that the potential audience of the texts could be made up of a global audience of non-native English speakers and that reception problems could be determined by the contact dynamics involving divergent cultural schemata from the text producers’. Hence, the need to propose and apply reformulation or ‘intra-lingual’ translation processes, that are considered one of the main facilitating techniques for an International audience (mainly represented by immigrants and asylum seekers, but also university students required to access specialized academic-legal texts). The Critical analysis and then processes of reformulation are thus systematically applied throughout the Chapters so as to consider first the original text problems and then evaluate them in a cross-cultural perspective. Empirical testing of the analysis finally represents the ultimate stage of the work and aims to probe the ‘inaccessibility’ hypothesis advanced in the beginning of the study as well as the reformulations through ELF offered in the study.