Abstract

This article presents the CercleS European Language Portfolio for university students in its translated Italian form. The illustration of the translation process takes inspiration from Rudyard Kipling's poem ‘I keep six honest serving men’ and answers the questions What? Why? When? How? Where? and Who? in explaining how the task was completed. The text is treated as an example of specialized discourse with its own organizational rhetoric and adherence to the canons of its genre. It is therefore an authoritative text in need of careful handling. A systemic functional linguistic approach is applied embracing concepts such as context of situation and grammatical metaphor. Particular attention is also paid to the old and new examples of the metalanguage of language pedagogy, concentrating on the content words and lexical sets which have autonomy as units of translation such as proficiency levels/livelli di competenza, avoiding the temptation to provide grammatically and semantically correct alternatives which, however, are not in the canon.