Walery Pisarek (Council for the Polish Language): Project Jasnopis [Clearwriting] and other recent endeavours for improvement of communication between public institutions and citizens in Poland
Project Jasnopis [Clearwriting] and other recent endeavours
for improvement of communication between public institutions and citizens in Poland
Abstract
Improving communication between the administration and the public needs to identify and remove barriers to mutual understanding. In linguistic terms, there are three main categories of the barriers: 1) ethnic, 2) stylistic, 3) physiological.
Since 1945, Poland is a country relatively unitary linguistically (according to the last 2011 national census, 98.5% of the population speak Polish at home). Eventual ethnic linguistic barriers in public communication in Poland are reduced by the Act of 6 January 2005 on National and Ethnic Minorities and on the regional language.
The interest in stylistic barriers in public communication intensified in Poland in this decade. On the initiative of various state institutions (including Ministry of the Interior, the Ombudsman, the Ministry of Culture and the President's Chancellery), several events - such as "Congress on Official Language" and social campaign "The official language friendly to the citizens” in 2012 or a public debate in the presidential palace "Can the official language be friendly to the citizens?" (www.prezydent.pl.dialog ) - took place after 2010. In this spirit in 2015 the Prime Minister’s Chancellery has launched a website www.citizen.pl and The Ombudsman continued to implement the recommendations of the Riga conference “ICT for an inclusive Society” when it comes to improving conditions for the participation of people with physiological disabilities in digital communication.
The growing interest in comprehensibility of official messages conduces to the development of automatic methods of measuring their accessibility using the "readability formulas". Currently, so far as Polish texts are concerned, two programs of this type compete against each other in the network: the older Logios from Wroclaw (http://www.logios.pl ) and newer, more advanced Jasnopis from Warsaw (http://jasnopis.pl/aplikacja )
