Aspects of Linguistic Complexity: A German – Norwegian Approach to the Creation of Resources for Easy-To-Understand Language

摘要

Our project draws on linguistic resources for German and Norwegian in support of initiatives that try to make public language more accessible. We focus on "Leichte Sprache" for German and "Klart Språk" for Norwegian. The former refers to usage forms of German which are easily understood also by users of German with a lower competence in text processing, the latter refers to a governance project which has as its aim to aid institutions in their effort to communicate with the public. While different in their goals both initiatives seek to increase the general access to public information. A central concern is to identify the factors which affect language complexity and set up linguistic resources such as parallel text corpora, linguistic rules and terminology databases. Based on these results and resources, we are building software that supports authors and translators, in close collaboration with them.