Make your online presence fit in with the Polish market

We’ve created this guide to help you get closer to your Polish customers. A web presence that is in tune with Poland’s culture will make your customers feel positive towards you, and give them the confidence to do business with you. By understanding these little yet important details, you'll be in a good position right from the start in your new market.

Polish is the main spoken and written language in Poland.

Should you be formal or informal when addressing your Polish customers?

The Polish are increasingly using the more informal form of address “Ty”. This is most seen in online communications. Though it is good to remember that there will still be some customers who are not used to this informal form of address.

The formal forms of address such as "Państwo" (plural), "Pan" (Mr), or "Pani" (Mrs) for one-to-one communication. You would also use this when referring to an email that you have sent or a phone call that you have made for the first time, before switching from a formal to a less formal relationship.

If you have a financial product, a legal service or are talking about money, you should adopt a more formal tone and style.

Numerals

In Poland it is customary to write numbers up to 10 with words (one, two, three, etc) and bigger numbers with digits, e.g one, three, nine, 17, 79, 200

Decimal separator

• This is a comma (,)
  • e.g. 1,5 hours.

Thousand separator

• The thousand separator is a space in numbers that consist of more than four digits

  • e.g. 9000, 10 000.

• Larger numbers are often written out with a combination of digits and words

  • e.g. 10 000 would be written 10 tysięcy (ten thousand) & 10 000 000 would be written 10 milionów (ten million)

Telephone numbers

• The country code is +48. The typical phone number notation is +48 123 456 789. Polish telephone numbers have 9 digits.

• The format is "12 345 67 89" within Poland and "+48 12 345 67 89" outside Poland.

Polish zloty. This is represented by the lowercase zł. Its trading three letter code is PLN. Polish coins are called grosz represented by the lowercase gr.

The zloty note denominations are 500 zł, 200 zł,100 zł, 50 zł, 20 zł, 10 zł.

The coin denominations are 1 gr, 2 gr, 5 gr, 10 gr, 20 gr, 50 gr, 1 zł, 2 zł, 5 zł.

In Poland the date format is DD.MM.YYYY, e.g. 24.06.2017.

The 24-hour clock is used in Poland.

The 24-hour clock is used mainly in writing and also for timetables and in official documents. The hour is separated from the minutes by a colon, e.g. 18:10

Standard working days are Monday to Friday.

Every culture has different superstitions and traditions which are always worth noting, especially when entering a new market. The Poles consider the number 13 to be unlucky and Friday 13th to be a particularly unlucky day, though this is just a fun superstition.

Here are the top six translation tips that will make you sound like a local in no time:

1. Avoid literal translations and guess work. You can do this by making sure the translation fits the context in terms of meaning and how easy it is to read.

2. Be careful not to be too formal in your tone.

3. Try not to use English syntax and sentence and phrase structure when translating into Polish. Avoid using English terms when a Polish term will work just as well.

4. Give your translators as much context as possible — give them references, define the target audience for them and tell them the communication objective.

5. Don't assume things that are natural for your language. Leave space for target language editing as much as possible. For example don't impose sentence structure through placeholder usage.

6. Test the final target version in its context. That way you can make any improvements before your communication goes live.

Discover how to ensure your website is local in tone and language in our localization guide.