📋 Tender Overview
The project, carried out as part of the Government's analysis, assessment and research activities, examined how different reader groups understand legislative texts in Finnish and Swedish, and which features of legislative language hinder and promote understanding of statutes. The groups studied included lawyers, other experts and lay people.
As expected, lawyers understand legal language best, but they also find regulations difficult and cumbersome. If the reader does not have a legal education, it will be more difficult to understand. Reading was particularly difficult due to long and complex sentences, references and terms. Short sentences, familiar words and bullet points were cited as features to facilitate comprehension. Swedish speakers considered terms to be a complicating feature clearly more often than Finnish speakers.
Assessment of comprehensibility for regulatory impact assessment and four other recommendations
Based on the survey and usability study, the researchers make five recommendations for improving regulatory language and its understanding:
An assessment of comprehensibility will be added to the impact assessment of regulations.
The intelligibility of statutes in legislative drafting will be assessed by means of usability testing.
Continue approximation of legal language to standard language.
Provide information on how to read legal texts and how to do so.
The Swedish version of the legislation will also be taken into account from the beginning of the legislative drafting process.
A total of 579 respondents participated in the Finnish-language survey and 87 in Swedish-speaking. In the usability study, the test subjects verbalised their experiences aloud while reading the adjustment.
Lawyers have a reading key, laypeople also blame themselves
The training of a lawyer provides a kind of "reading key" for legal texts. Such a key may be, for example, that the lawyer has a preconceived understanding of the legal nature and outcome of the case thanks to his or her training, as well as experience in reading statutes. It is more difficult for an unaccustomed reader to see what is necessary information and what can be excluded. Laypeople blamed not only the text but also themselves for the difficulties in understanding.
The research project was carried out by the Centre for the Languages of Finland, the University of Helsinki and the University of Warsaw.
Further information: Salli Kankaanpää, Director of Department, Centre for the Languages of Finland, tel. 0295 333 240, salli.kankaanpaa@kotus.fi, and Susanna Siitonen, Legislative Director, Chair of the project steering group, Ministry of Justice, tel. 0295 150 083, email susanna.siitonen@gov.fi.
