Suchergebnisse

An der Sprache des Rechts wird Kritik geübt, seit die Aufklärung die Verständlichkeit der Gesetze zu ihrem Anliegen gemacht hat. Mit den großen Kodifikationen des Rechts im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert hat die Kritik am angeblich schlechten, unverständlichen Juristendeutsch eine besondere demokratietheoretische Legitimation bekommen. Diese Sprachkritik sucht seit den siebziger Jahren vermehrt bei der Linguistik Rat, wie denn eine bessere Allgemeinverständlichkeit von Rechtstexten verwirklicht werden könnte. Der Band versammelt systematisch aufeinander bezogene Beiträge ausgewiesener Linguisten, Juristen und Schriftsteller zur Problematik des Verständnisses juristischer Sprache, zur Methodik empirischer Verständlichkeitsmessung und zu den Möglichkeiten transdisziplinärer Kooperation zwischen Rechts- und Sprachwissenschaftlern.

Newspapers have been overestimating the ability of their readers to identify the meaning of such abbreviations as ICBM, AAUW, NAACP and even C of C, according to the results of a survey made by using samples of readers in St. Louis and journalism students at the State University of Iowa.

Children's attention to television, measured by visual attention and by self-reports, varied in this study depending on the comprehensibility of the content. Children's visual attention was lower when they viewed Sesame Street, Greek, and backwards language bits than with randomly edited or normal bits, but their visual attention did not discriminate between random and normal bits. However, self-reports of effort to comprehend showed that the oldest children found the random bits harder to understand than the normal bits. Because the older children's visual attention was equivalent for two types of bits that they reported were different in difficulty, the results suggest that comprehensibility may be of limited value in explaining older children's active television viewing, but also that studies explicitly tying together visual attention, effort, perceptions of a wide variety of program characteristics, and comprehension are in order.

Traffic signs are commonly used traffic safety tools, mainly developed to provide crucial information in a short time to support safe drive; but the success depends on their comprehensibility by the drivers. Also, a sudden change in the traditionally used and accepted signs can cause significant safety problem, as in the case of cancellation of red oblique bars in 2004 as a part of the European Union Harmonization Process of Turkey.

Traffic signs are commonly used traffic safety tools, mainly developed to provide crucial information in a short time to support safe drive; but the success depends on their comprehensibility by the drivers. Also, a sudden change in the traditionally used and accepted signs can cause significant safety problem, as in the case of cancellation of red oblique bars in 2004 as a part of the European Union Harmonization Process of Turkey.

Abstract
The current article briefly presents a pilot machine-learning experiment on the classification of official texts addressed to lay readers with the use of support vector machine as a baseline and fastText models.
For this purpose, a hand-crafted corpus was used, created by the experts of the National Tax and Customs Administration of Hungary under the office's Public Accessibility Programme. The corpus contained sentences that were paraphrased or completely rewritten by the experts to make them more readable for lay people, as well their original counter pairs. The aim was to automatically distinguish between these two classes by using supervised machine-learning algorithms.
If successful, such a machine-learning-based model could be used to draw the attention of experts involved in making the texts of official bodies more comprehensible to the average reader to the potentially problematic points of a text. Therefore, the process of rephrasing such texts could be sped up drastically.
Such a rephrasing (considering, above all, the needs of the average reader) can improve the overall comprehensibility of official (mostly legal) texts, and therefore supports access to justice, the transparency of governmental organizations and, most importantly, improves the rule of law in a given country.

A few recent studies of open-book comprehension for printed instructions lead to the rule of thumb that such instructions will be understood correctly about two-thirds of the time. In the experiment reported here, two different flowchart formats were compared with standard paragraph instructions and were found to be superior in comprehension accuracy and speed. The two-thirds rule and the flowchart effect were both sustained in comprehension testing in a subsequent field trial.

(Beitrag 5. Europäisches Symposium zur Verständlichkeit von Rechtsvorschriften des Bundesministeriums der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz) The most understandable of texts is of little use as law if it is not clear that it is authoritative. This is the comparative lesson of this essay. American law is—Americans say—indeterminate. American law is indeterminate because American texts, clear as they may be in wording, often are not authoritative; other texts apply too and may be inconsistent. German law is rarely indeterminate in this sense. This essay identifies in bullet-points some comparative aspects of clarity of American and German law. Why is American law indeterminate? Why is German law not? What, if anything, do these differences counsel for future European Union law? I identify five areas of differences. 1. Legal System and Statutes, 2. Lawmaking. 3. Federalism. 4. Constitutional Review and 5. Law Application.

A study was conducted to compare the relative comprehensibility of pictorial information and printed words in instructions. Six picture-word formats were examined using 24 procedural problems on three types of tasks. The formats were print-only, pictorial-only, pictorial-related print, print-related pictorial, pictorial-redundant print, and print-redundant pictorial. The results showed pictorial information important for speed but print information necessary for accuracy. Comprehension of instructions on all three tasks was most efficient with the pictorial-related print and pictorial-redundant print formats but could not be shown to be simply a function of number of visual information channels used or the degree of redundancy between channels. The type of information displayed in the visual channels was found to be important.