Summaries in the Official Bulletin of the Basque Country
Translation: Kristin Addis
Abstract
From the time of its inception, the Basque Government began to publish the Official Bulletin in Spanish and Basque. In each publication, there is a summary or synthesis of the contents, which vary considerably. Unfortunately, in the author's opinion, the large majority of these summaries over the years have not shown an appropriate use of the language, even though the terminology and structures themselves are intelligible. In this article, the author takes one of the above-mentioned introductions to the Bulletin as an example and attempts to make it more intelligible, using two rules as guideposts: first and foremost, the universal law of thematic progression, according to which, information should be sequenced appropriately and without leaps in order to achieve an accessible text; the second law, which depends on the first, is that of linguistic typology, according to which Basque is fundamentally a more verbal than nominal language (it is not acceptable to use additional information unnecessarily as a complement, to the left of the noun. Specifically, the progression of complements toward the left goes against thematic progression).
