The European Council summit took place on 14 and 15 December 2001 in Laeken. The conference participants unanimously confirmed their readiness to close the accession negotiations before the end of 2002. In Declaration on the Future of the European Union the chiefs of states and heads of governments of the member states established the European Convention. It was also stated that the Convention’s task would be to prepare and lead a discussion on the future of the European Union and organize an Intergovernmental Conference in 2004. During the summit anagreement was reached according to which without institutional reforms the EU would not be able to fully use the enlargement profits. As Joschka Fischer adequately pointed “the enlargement process is a suitable opportunity for carrying out the reforms”.

Italian Eurolect: an analysis based on articles of the European constitution

The following article discusses the linguistic features of legal Italian and the notion of Eurolect; the analysis is based on articles of the European Constitution. The information provided herein aims to demonstrate that legal Italian has a different set of qualities in comparison with those that apply to Eurolect. The author of the article describes the principal characteristics of the Italian language that is used in the institutions of the European Union, a language that is the result of translating the Community legislation, drafted primarily in English or French, and is different from the actual linguistic norms of Italian. It is grammatically correct, yet its quality is not satisfactory for a native speaker. This problem is called attrito linguistico and is a new term in Italian linguistics. Due to this problem, these texts are often criticised for being low-quality translations, but their quality is the result of requirements imposed on translators. The third part of this article then goes into detail about the main features of translated Italian texts and focuses on the analysis of some of the articles present in the European Constitution in order to elaborate on the choices made during the translation and to suggest further solutions.