Expert-lay communication in the medical field requires the utmost attention to readers’ or listeners’ needs and competences. If these are neglected, laypeople’s comprehension of the message is likely to be negatively affected. Text types like package leaflets and informed consents have been the object of countless studies. In this volume, Giulia Pedrini examines a new document type: the layperson summary of clinical trials. She conducts her analysis from a contrastive and translational perspective in three languages (English, German, and Italian). All texts are instances of interlingual translations of simplified documents written in Plain Language; a still widely unexplored niche within the field of translation studies.

Giulia Pedrini is a post-doc researcher at the University of Trieste (Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies), where she has also been teaching German-Italian translation as an adjunct professor at the course Interlinguistic Communication Applied to Legal Professions. She obtained her PhD in Linguistic and Literary Studies (‘Studi linguistici e letterari’) with a focus on Linguistics, Translation and Interpreting at the University of Udine, in convention with the University of Trieste. Her main research interests are accessibility, Plain Language, translation studies, contrastive linguistics, medical language and terminology.