„Einwanderer“, „Flüchtling“, „Migrant“: ein korpuslinguistischer interlingualer Vergleich (Deutsch, Dänisch, Italienisch)

Migration has been a topical phenomenon for centuries, which explains why the discourse on migration has been analysed under various perspectives, including linguistic ones. The present paper intends to settle in this field, conducting an interlinguistic discourse analysis which takes into consideration the Italian, German and Danish online language. We asked ourselves what the most used terms to name people involved in migration were, how they were translated in the most important dictionaries of the considered languages, and whether we presuppose or assume the same, while using these terms in the different languages. To answer these questions, the TenTen-Family corpora available on Sketch Engine were used. After looking at the most important German words to name people who set off to move in another country and their Italian and Danish equivalents proposed by dictionaries, we decided to focus on “Einwanderer”, “Flüchtling” and “Migrant”: after a first quantitative comparison between the German, Italian and Danish equivalents based on their relative frequency, a qualitative interlinguistic analysis of their collocations and metaphors was carried out using a number of tools available on Sketch Engine, with the aim of highlighting general tendencies. The results proved that the equivalents provided by dictionaries show in fact a high degree of complexity in their use in the online discourse: not only do they not always appear in the same contexts (see collocations), but they often do not share the same metaphors. This paper paths the way for further linguistic studies in this field, but it could also prove useful for translators dealing with online language in German, Italian and Danish.