The Office of the Folketing Hansard

The Office of the Folketing Hansard, Folketingstidende, publishes the official report of the plenary proceedings in the Danish Parliament.

Større

The official report of the plenary proceedings in the Folketing has been published since Denmark’s first constitution in 1849. Until 2009, the report was a printed document, but today it is a digital document published online, including retro-digitised documents dating back to 1850. In addition to the official report, we also publish online all the parliamentary documents of the Folketing.

The online publication of the official report

Writing and publishing the official report of the plenary proceedings is our main task at the Office of the Folketing Hansard. The report is substantially verbatim, only slightly edited in accordance with these four general editing guidelines set up by the Presidium of the Danish Parliament:

  • The spoken language is adapted into a colloquial and syntactically coherent written language with a liberal approach to what is deemed correct language.
  • The speeches are edited with great care in order to ensure that the intentions of the speaker are clear.
  • Factual errors and slips of the tongue are corrected.
  • The appropriate formal requirements are met.

Unlike the procedure in many other parliaments, Danish MP’s do not approve the report before it is published, but they can complain if they feel misquoted. However, this happens very rarely.

 

The provisional report

The first edition of the official report is produced and published in instalments, so you can read what a member has said typically within a couple of hours after the speech. The PDF files are watermarked “Foreløbig” (provisional). Usually, the complete first edition of the report of a sitting is available online no later than the next day.

The final report

The second edition of the official report is the final, authoritative text. This edition has been proofread and corrected to ensure that the text corresponds to the sound recording. Usually, the second edition is published after a few months.


The Office of the Folketing Hansard transcribes the report using a custom-built respeak voice recognition system called Edixi. The name Edixi is a contraction of »edit« and the Latin word »dixi«, which means »I have spoken«.

The speeches in the chamber are logged by a reporter, who creates a list of speech segments, which the editing reporters then use when they work on their sequences. The sequences are approximately five minutes long. Listening to the sound recording, the reporters respeak or dictate the report, editing it according to the guidelines as they go along. We call this process transediting.

Reporters in the Office of the Folketing Hansard (Folketingstidende) proofread bills, committee reports and other parliamentary documents and, if necessary, make linguistic revisions before they are debated in the Chamber. We also proofread the daily order paper before it is published.

Occasionally, the Office of the Folketing Hansard writes verbatim reports of committee hearings. Every year a small team of reporters participate in the annual plenary meeting of The Nordic Council where they write the report of all speeches held in Danish. We also participate in different projects in the administration of the Folketing.

Historically, the parliamentary documents have been printed in several sections as supplements (tillæg) to the report. This structure is still used on the website, and Folketingstidende currently consists of tillæg A to H.

Section  Content
Tillæg A
  • Introductory remarks to bills
  • Bills
  • Proposals for parliamentary resolutions
Tillæg B
  • Committee reports
  • Additional committee reports
  • Additions to committee reports
  • Additions to additional committee reports
  • Amendments
  • Statements from committees
Tillæg C
  • Acts
  • Parliamentary resolutions
Tillæg D
  • Introductory remarks to the fiscal bill
  • The fiscal bill 
  • The Finance Committee’s report on the finance bill
  • The Finance Committee’s additional report on the finance bill
  • Amendments to the finance bill
  • The finance act
Tillæg E
  • Bills introduced solely to the Finance Committee
Tillæg F
  • The Official Report of the parliament proceedings
Tillæg G
  • Interpellations and ministers’ reports
  • Proposals to be passed (proposed after an interpellation debate)
Tillæg H
  •  Amended bills that are re-printed