ABSTRACT
Introduction It is a shared opinion amongst many linguists2 that the language employed by international institutions and organisations tends to be deprived of all kinds of positioning and bias up to the point of becoming a ‘cotton language’, a language made less effective by the removal of internal discussion.3 This appears to be in contrast with the widespread perception that the European Union is unable to speak with a single voice as a unitary actor (see also Chapters 9 and 11). Our hypothesis is twofold: the conflict among multiple voices may be due to the presence of counter-discourse and/or to the translation from one official language into another – notably processes that are present within the European Parliament (henceforth EP). Analysing the communication of the EU from the point of view of Discourse Studies and Translation Studies thus proves particularly relevant. Hence our research aims to investigate whether it is possible to identify traces of counter-discourse coming from the alter-globalist ATTAC association in the EP reports.4 Our observation starts from the French versions, as ATTAC France is the main source of the counter-discourse. We shall then move to the comparative analysis of the EP English and French texts in order to observe the effects of translation on discourse. The multilingual versions available on the official EP websites are the results of processes of translation and editing. In ‘Translators and translation’ we explain why, together with Translation Studies scholars,5 we prefer to use the term ‘translation’ to refer to these texts. The reason for choosing parliamentary reports is that, as a genre, they do not possess binding value, thus they encourage the deployment of a discourse that is not yet institutive,6 and allow polyphony and co-discursive openness towards other discourses, such as the counter-discourses. Such openness should not be envisaged as a lack of legitimation or pragmatic weakness, as the reports actually contribute to the circulation of the European Union’s ideas and values. According to Judge and Earnshow7 and taking into account the enlargement policy, Aydin-Düzgit highlights ‘the important degree of discursive power’ of the EP.8
