The article discusses the importance of creating a specialized format for easy language legal texts. The authors argue that traditional legal texts can be difficult for people with low literacy or cognitive impairments to understand, leading to a need for simplified versions. To address this issue, the authors propose a four-level complexity hierarchy for translating legal texts into easy language.
Level 1: Summary in Easy Language
The first level of the hierarchy is a summary of the underlying standard language/legal document, with a pre-defined maximum length. This version should be easy to read and understand for people who need low-barrier text forms. It also helps readers appreciate the central meaning of the underlying document.
Level 2: Complete Version in Easy Language
The second level is a complete version of the legal text in easy language, which reduces linguistic complexity without affecting content. This version conveys most of the (legal) statements of the original document and may be longer than the original text on which it is based.
Level 3: Original Text in Standard Language
The third level is the original text in standard language.
Categorization of Datasets
The authors identified inductively text genres and domains in the dataset, categorizing them into three exclusive genres:
- Encyclopedic (ENC) texts are summaries of general or special knowledge;
- Articles (ART) are published nonfiction texts; and
- Unknown (UNK) are texts whose author did not provide sufficient information to be clearly categorized.
In addition to the genre, the datasets were tagged with seven domains: - Medical, covering all aspects of human health;
- Disability, which covers all aspects of the life and interests of people with disabilities;
- News, are texts about current events without defining a field of interest;
- Politics, discussing topics about politically viewpoints or activities such as electoral programs of political parties;
- Government, any information published by public authorities and/or containing administrative and non-partisan legal information.
Majority of Datasets: News and Encyclopedic Articles
The majority of datasets are news and encyclopedic articles, with a comparatively large number of monolingual datasets addressing the interests of people with disabilities. This is because public authorities in Germany are obliged to communicate in simple and understandable language.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the article proposes a specialized format for easy language legal texts, which includes a four-level complexity hierarchy. The proposed format aims to make legal texts more accessible to people with low literacy or cognitive impairments. By using everyday language and engaging metaphors, this summary captures the essence of the article without oversimplifying complex concepts.
