Plain Language and text accessibility in health communication
Giulia Pedrini · Easy - plain - accessible · 2023
According to Busch-Lauer (2001), “[m]edicine is one of the highly competitive international fields of research and practice where knowledge transfer and effective communication require a particular sensitivity of specialists towards language [both L1 and Lx], culture, individuum, and community” (849). As a matter of fact, this specialized domain is characterized by epistemic – and thus also power – asymmetry 1 between communication act participants, i.e. expert and layperson. If communication is not handled properly, these dissymmetries may lead to both the so-called expert knowledge barrier (‘Fachbarriere’) and expert language barrier (‘Fachsprachenbarriere’) according to the terminology used by Rink (2019, 2020) (building on Schubert 2016 and Jekat et al. 2014) in her categorization of communication barriers. 2