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Article published In:
Corpus-Based Research in Legal and Institutional Translation
Edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos
[Translation Spaces 8:1] 2019
► pp. 167–191

The challenge of multilingual ‘plain language’ in translation-mediated Swiss administrative communication

A preliminary comparative analysis of insurance leaflets

| University of Geneva
| University of Geneva

Barrier-free communication should be an institutional priority when drafting administrative texts. These not only deal with legal content, but they often address the lay citizen and may provide general information on services and reforms or simply instruct on a specific procedure to be followed. Our study investigates Swiss insurance leaflets in three languages (French, German and Italian) and aims at evaluating language clarity on the basis of ‘plain language’ guidelines, thus also considering the translation variable. However, our preliminary results show that ‘plain communication’ is not always the case. We applied a quantitative and qualitative triangulation methodology: firstly, we measured readability with the help of readability indices; subsequently, we used computational tools to highlight common linguistic gaps whose quality was also explored manually by taking textual aspects into account.

Keywords: plain language, Swiss insurance leaflets, translation, administrative language, multilingualism, readability, syntactical complexity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Plain legal and administrative language in multilingual Switzerland
  • 3.Corpus and methodology
  • 4.Quantitative and qualitative analysis
    • 4.1Common linguistic problems
    • 4.2Language-specific problems
    • 4.3The impact of translation on accessibility
  • 5.Conclusions and outlook
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.00017.fel
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