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This paper examines legal communication in Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) discourse and investigates the rhetorical strategies implemented at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, the paper focuses on a dataset of legal provisions introduced as emergency legislation – measures adopted to tackle unprecedented circumstances – in Italy and the US, in order to identify commonalities and differences when informing the general public of the measures laid down particularly to protect workers in the workplace. This paper is intended to contribute to research in discourse analysis in OHS, an area of expertise which has been given fresh momentum since the onset of the pandemic. The decision to examine Italian and US emergency legislation was made in consideration of the cultural and legal differences between the two countries, which give rise to a number of discursive approaches to emergency management.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has produced serious consequences in social and economic terms. The speed at which this pandemic spread in the initial weeks led governments to take drastic measures in order to contain its devastating effects. To this end, lockdowns were imposed in many countries which lasted for months, affecting people’s lives in important respects. The way in which the general public was apprised of these restrictions deserves attention, as communication plays a major role at the time of implementing measures impacting on people’s freedoms. Based on these considerations, this paper provides a comparison of the rhetorical devices adopted by national governments to inform the public of the beginning of the lockdown. Specifically, the statements with which the Prime Ministers of Italy and the UK announced the implementation of lockdown measures will be examined, with a view to investigating their linguistic features in both Italian and English.

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to examine whether genre overlapping and register variation have implications on the translation outcome. To this end, the English and the Italian version of the letter sent by Sergio Marchionne to the President of Confindustria – Italy’s most important employers’ organisation – will be analysed. The decision to investigate Marchionne’s statement is based on the fact that this is a letter disseminated in the form of a press release, which also contains highly-technical terminology pertaining to Employment Relations (ER) discourse. Consequently, a number of issues might arise when deciding which strategy should be used in terms of genre analysis and register when translating specialised texts.

This paper examines the notion of ‘moonlighting’, which in industrial relations discourse refers to secondary employment performed in addition to the employee’s main job. As this concept might lend itself to different interpretations in English, the aim of this paper is to consider whether the ambiguous nature of this wording in source texts is also reflected in target texts, exploring how translators deal with it when rendering this concept in other languages. To this end, documents published by international institutions in English and their translations in French, Italian and Spanish were compared and contrasted, investigating the strategies put in place by translators to convey the meaning of “moonlighting” in other languages.

Previous research has shown that trade unions have resorted to a number of rhetorical tools to make their arguments and ensure the voice of their members was heard. In a time in which union membership is declining and many have questioned trade unions' representation role, the recourse to figurative language – e.g. metaphors – might contribute to getting unions' messages through, restoring trust among affiliates. Against this backdrop, this paper examines the metaphorical devices employed in trade union discourse, with a view to appreciating the way they are utilised in employee relations and highlighting the values unions intend to promote through these figures of speech. To this end, discourse analysis is carried out on a data corpus consisting of documents issued by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in a given timeframe, in which metaphorical language is employed. The analysis focuses on a specific topic, i.e. platform workers and the protection of their rights. The findings reveal that metaphors are used by trade unions to convey different meanings, which are intended to generate narratives aimed at safeguarding the rights of platform workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between law and language in workplace discourse. To this end, a number of pronouncements issued by Australia's Fair Work Commission – which mostly deals with employment litigation – are examined to see to what extent language-related problems affect both the employment relationship and the decision handed down by lawmakers when evaluating the cases submitted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the terminology adopted in English to translate the Italian concept of reddito di cittadinanza (Rdc). An analysis was carried out on a dataset consisting of newspaper articles in English, in order to examine how the notion of Rdc was rendered in the British press. By evaluating the different expressions used to convey the meaning of the concept, the paper shows how the terminology adopted in English might affect target readers' understanding of the functioning and mechanisms of Rdc, frustrating the attempt to explain this particular benefit with reference to comparable measures in place in other national systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to investigate the way translators deal with rendering industrial relations concepts in another language. For this purpose, an examination of the strategies adopted to translate the concept of welfare aziendale into English will be carried out in a number of annual reports issued by Italian companies listed on the Stock Exchange. The article aims to cast light on the challenges arising from comparing industrial relations concepts and the effectiveness of the techniques adopted by translators to ensure clarity in the target language. In addition, the article aims to encourage translation studies (TS) scholars to engage in the analysis of comparative industrial relations, a fascinating, though under-researched, field of analysis from a TS perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the examination of a national-specific industrial relations practice - Italy's ammortizzatori sociali - this paper intends to provide an analysis of the strategies put in place by translators at the European Union to render peculiar concepts in English in official texts and to evaluate the translation process outcome in terms of effectiveness and clarity of meaning. To this purpose, a corpus of documents has been scrutinised that have been produced in Italian and then translated into English containing the expression ammortizzatori sociali. The findings of the analysis show that different approaches have been used by EU translators to render this notion which give rise to distinct outcomes as far as translation equivalence and faithfulness are concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines one consequence of the increasingly multilingual and multicultural labor market, resulting from migratory flows caused in part by globalization. It focuses on selected legal and translation issues in labor relations arising from misinterpretations and cultural disparities in communication between different languages and cultures. It draws on decisions of the United States National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), where there were misleading and ambiguous translations. It employs a theoretical approach based on concepts from cross-cultural management, including cultural theory, and thereby expands the discipline of Translation Studies. The findings suggest that an understanding of the cultural content, particularly in the practice of intercultural management, is imperative. The paper concludes that a systematic methodology linking culture and language in labor relations should be adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right to disconnect has been welcomed by those who regarded it as a "new generation right", though many consider it as a mere repetition of the right to rest. Through the analysis of the Italian regulation of lavoro agile, and with specific reference to working and non-working time, this paper frames the right to disconnect in the context of the legal system and the transformation of work. In so doing, it identifies different interpretations of the right to disconnect which call for a review of the notion of time in the employment relationship, also in consideration occupational health and safety and privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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It is a given that contrasting institutional realities entails translation problems, since practices that are specific to a certain legal system might not have an equivalent in another one. This aspect is even more pronounced in the discipline of industrial relations (IR), where the terminology used is often the result of negotiations and collective bargaining between different actors. Yet, and barring some exceptions, the hurdle faced by translators when rendering foreign practices in this field has been somehow neglected by scholars of translation studies, particularly as the IR discourse has been frequently treated as a subgenre of the legal one. In order to fill this gap, this paper sets out to investigate the challenges stemming from rendering national IR concepts in a number of languages. To do so, the notion of cassa integrazione guadagni, a practice that is peculiar to Italy’s IR system, will be investigated to see how this institution was translated into English, French and Spanish in texts drafted by the European Commission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines linguistic issues arising from the discourse of comparative labour law and industrial relations. In an analytical framework based on the work of cognitive linguists the article takes as its starting point certain ideologically loaded terms that are contentious in their country of origin, and then considers the most common problem, that of identifying connections between concepts, institutions and practices across national systems. The focus then turns to intralinguistic variation, arguing that in the disciplinary domain under examination several terms are often used for what is substantially the same concept. The question of faux amis is then considered, followed by a discussion of metaphor and the problem of attempting to transpose metaphoric from one language into another. The conclusions highlight the importance for the translator of identifying specific regional and national terms in the globalized labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, lawsuits alleging the misclassification of workers as “independent contractors” rather than “employees” have become widespread in the United States. Determining employee status is important because such status is a gateway to many substantive legal rights. In response, some commentators have proposed an in-between hybrid category just for the gig economy. However, such an intermediate category is not new. In fact, it has existed in many countries for decades, producing successful results in some and misadventure in others. We use a comparative approach to analyze the experiences of Canada, Italy, and Spain with the intermediate category. In Italy, the quasi-subordinate category created an opportunity for arbitrage that resulted in less worker protection. The end result was confusion, and since 2015, the third category’s use has been extremely limited. Spain’s third category, the TRADE, was only made available to a small percentage of self-employed workers because of the burdensome nature of its regulations and the high dependency threshold required for inclusion. As for Canada, the practical result of the “dependent contractor” category was to expand the definition of employee and to bring more workers under the ambit of labor law protection. We ultimately conclude that workable proposals for a third category must also encompass other forms of precarious employment. Working within the existing framework, one solution would be to change the default presumptions regarding the two categories that already exist. Above a minimum threshold of hours worked or income earned, the default rule would be an employment relationship for most gig workers except those that may fit into a “safe harbor” for de minimis amateurs or volunteers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the phenomenon of social dumping and "Laval conflict, started with accession of the Eastern countries to the European Union, on Baltic Sea region; and use of industrialization and globalization to prevent social dumping.