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

Melanie Siegel

Abstract:

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 Sprak” 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