Un italiano per l’Europa: la traduzione come prova di vitalità, Roma: Carocci, 1-249.

Translation as a test of language vitality. Today the claim that “Europe speaks with a single voice in many languages” is considered necessary for European integration. But awareness of the controversies related to legal equivalence grows, while the concept of linguistic ‘equivalence’ remains an axiomatic attribute of the different language versions, not a quality that can be modified and demonstrated. Although EU institutions request their translators to pay attention to different registers and diverse styles, lexical vagueness and weak logical connections spread a sense of approximation that makes the voice of Europe distant from ordinary language and occasionally quite unpalatable. The gap between the aims of multilingualism and the reality of translation has increased attention for the flexibility and adaptation of the national languages. If a phenomenon of ‘Europeanization’ of all languages is underway, this is due to the increasing pressure of English. Thus the question to be asked is whether the EU still functions as an agency of language maintenance or rather of language shift? The authors of the following papers seek to answer this question not so much from the general interaction between English and their different mother tongues, but more specifically between English as a lingua franca and the Europeanised varieties of national languages as they are now used and promoted by EU institutions.