Introduction [The Many Facets of Remediation in Language Studies]

Remediation can relate to both the elaboration of new and hybrid text-types and also to the representations of identity. For instance, politicians have always insisted on the ‘identification-with-the-politician process’ whether in Presidential addresses, political adverts, TV political interviews and so on. However, remediation can also take the form of recontextualisation, reconceptualisation, and intralinguistic translation of exclusive expertise into knowledge that is suitable to the background of the addresse. In these cases we witness a shift from subject-orientation to addressee-/audience-orientation, as the addressee turns into a participant in the communicative situation. As a consequence, this implies a departure from the typical features of Languages for Special Purpose such as lexical precision, textual precision, economy, conciseness, and depersonalisation and objectivation. Typical examples of this process are for instance PILs (Patient Information Leaflets), characterised by omission or reduction of information for prescribers, reduction of technical detail, as well as simplification of terminology, explicitation and reformulation which, in turn, can be defined as typical knowledge dissemination strategies. Along the same vein, but in a somewhat different way, we can list also information books as attesting to the link between remediation and knowledge dissemination. They are one of the essential vehicles for popularising and spreading knowledge among a juvenile audience. Bought and read with the aim of satisfying one’s personal curiosity on a specific topic, thus “for interest or pleasure”, or as parallel resources in classrooms, they compete with and endorse school textbooks or coursebooks by exploiting devices and characteristics of more innovative and “modern” media, disseminating expert discourse. They subscribe to the idea of popularisation as a sort of intralingual translation, which also involves a process of creation and re-elaboration.