Simple. Tradurre, semplificare

This paper presents a framework for the analysis of students’ multi-source intra- and interlingual summary writing for independent, coherent and impactful transedited target texts. Starting from literature on summary writing competence in students, the paper argues for increased higher-level summarization skills on the formal linguistic, semantic and content levels. In view of the genre of popular-scientific source texts which are studied here, it further focusses on adequate news flows of epistemic modality and expressions of degree, as well as adequately summarized evidentiality in the form of citation and attribution. These aspects are studied on the basis of the summaries of two source texts on the topic of microplastics produced by three smaller groups of students in a course of Writing and translating of journalistic texts (English-Dutch) at KU Leuven, Campus Antwerp during subsequent academic years. The preliminary results on the basis of this material confirm the need for better higher-level summarization skills expressed in the literature and for better textual coherence and cohesion. In function of the popular-scientific text genre the specific features of modal epistemic and evidential markers are also studied in terms of adequate summarization and identified as areas for improvement in the students summarized renderings of this specific text type. Didactic avenues are inferred with respect to the different categories above. In addition, it is argued that narrative techniques, possibly in collaborative summary writing, and instructions for relevant headline drafting may offer didactic support for impactful and meaningful multi-source, intra- and interlingual summary writing. This practice is presented in the context of journalistic translation as ‘transediting’. Finally, the potential of AI-generated text as didactic support for multi-source text coherent summarizing is briefly explored.