Europe for Women: The Re-Mediation of Institutional Discourse in the EU Campaigns for Gender Equality

By opening the pages of the European Union (EU) website, you can obtain a wide range of information about the EU’s work in every field. The Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion section leads the reader to detailed information about the institution’s commitment for women and also provides different materials about the gender equality campaigns run by the European Commission from 2009. In the EU, citizen empowerment is becoming fundamental in order to raise awareness on human rights, so the institution has generated, in addition to legal documents, a variety of informative and promotional materials and provided information in a form that can be easily understood by those who are not legal specialists. The analysis is based on a corpus collected from the EU’s website. It includes different text types – posters, leaflets and video clips – which belong to the EU campaigns for gender equality. Following the tradition of Critical Discourse Analysis and Multimodality, I investigate the discursive practices and strategies identifying the recurrent features employed in order to disseminate information on European citizens’ rights in a friendly language and narrow the gap between sexes. In particular, this study focuses on the way legal documents such as directives are ‘translated’ for the computer screen and on the way the several modes such as words, pictures, sounds and colours are produced and re-produced in order to reach citizens at every possible level. Thus, a pragmatic comparison between source legal texts and target texts allows to identify the linguistic and visual elements used to simplify source genres in order to communicate legal discourse on women rights to the European layman.