Editing specialized texts in english

This volume examines the editing of specialized texts as practised by the Editing Unit at the Directorate- General for Translation at the European Commission in Brussels. Following a corpusassisted approach, it compares two comparable corpora of the same texts, in their non-edited and edited versions. Using quantitative techniques from corpus linguistics together with manual text analysis, the author reflects on the types of revisions that are made, of a formal, grammatical and lexical nature, and on some phraseological aspects of the edited texts. The conclusions drawn are that the written English representing supranational organizations such as the European Union institutions continues to be norm-bound, adhering to standard British English. However, traces of influences from other European languages, in terms of false friends, and certain grammatical phrases, characterize the corpus of edited texts more than reference corpora of British English. Similarly to translated language, edited language is also found to be characterized by explicitation and simplification.