Drafting clear and accessible legislation has become a major concern in different monolingual and multilingual institutional settings. In multilin-gual contexts, where different language versions of official publications are developed through translation, legislation tends to be more accessible, as noticed by linguists, as well as translation and legal scholars. This study builds upon this hypothesis and aims at verifying whether legislative acts translated into Italian in two multilingual contexts (Switzerland and the EU) are in reality more accessible than their counterparts originally drafted in Italian (Italy). To this end, four legislative corpora were compared, rep-resenting the following varieties of legal Italian and text genres respec-tively: (1) Swiss federal legislative acts, (2) EU directives, (3) transposition measures of EU directives into Italian legislation and (4) Italian domestic legislation. The mostly quantitative analyses presented in this paper focus on one aspect of plain language, i.e. lexical readability, more specifically the use of basic and common vocabulary and the occurrence of archaic and complex connectives typically used in legal and administrative language. The results confirm that translated legislation features an overall more ac-cessible vocabulary and resorts more sparingly to higher-register variants of common functional words, thus corroborating the hypothesis of transla-tion as a catalyst for clear legislation.