Bureaucratic Terminology, or, the Hardships of Language Simplification in Italy

Founded on the analysis of a small corpus of Italian and English documents, the paper aims to discuss some anachronistic features that characterize the language of the administration in Italy. An overall formal rigidity, low-frequency lexical items (mostly terms), unclear jargon and complex syntactic structures definitely hinder communicative effectiveness and raise the risk of misunderstanding both in the internal hierarchical communication within the institution and in the external communication addressed to other institutions or to the general public. These negative features frequently combine with some forms of inconsequential textual organization, thus inevitably reverberating on the scope and significance of a text. Despite repeated official initiatives aimed at simplification imposed by the necessity of sharing information at both national and international (European) level, the language of the administration - bureaucratese – shows forms of resistance to change that cause serious drawbacks in communication and ask for linguistic as well as cultural adaptation owing to the different approach and perspective in tackling the presentation of the topics. The English corpus serves the intent of comparing these different perspectives, pointing to possible solutions in view of the simplification of bureaucratese and of problem-solving strategies useful during the act of linguistic and cultural mediation.