Barrieren abbauen, Sprache gestalten

Leichte Sprache ist ein zentrales Konzept der barrierefreien Kommunikation. Fachtexte, Informationsbroschüren und andere Texte aus dem täglichen Leben dabei werden in leicht verständliche Texte übersetzt. Die drei Beiträge der vorliegenden Publikation untersuchen verschiedene linguistische Aspekte der Leichten Sprache. Im Speziellen ordnen sie Leichte Sprache als einen Fall von intralingualer Translation ein. Sie untersuchen Komplexität von Leichter Sprache, die Vereinfachungsstrategien, die beim Verfassen von Texten in Leichter Sprache verwendet werden sowie die Strategien, die zur Explizierung in Leichte Sprache Texten verwendet werden.The concept of easy-to-read language is a central one in the area of barrier-free communication. Among other thing, it involves the translation of technical texts, information materials and other texts used in everyday situations into texts that are easy to read. The three contributions in this publication report on investigations of various aspects of easy-to-read language. In particular, they consider easy-to-read language as a special case of intralingual translation. They explore the complexity of easy-to-read language, the simplification strategies that are used in the production of easy-to-read texts, and the strategies that are used for explicitation in such texts

frameworks and methods for impact assessment

This study provides an overview of existing approaches and methods for assessing the environmental impacts of trade and trade-related activities. It considers both approaches that are tailored to the assessment of trade- environment linkages and more generic approaches for environmental assessment and analyzes their respective usability in the context of trade-related development cooperation. The study thereby aims to contribute to a more extensive use of such tools, while improving the practice and application of environmental assessments of trade-related policies and programs. In doing so, the study will complement the existing study on the assessment of the socio- economic impacts from trade carried out by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI)1. The study is divided into two parts. Part I begins with a brief discussion on trade-related development cooperation followed by a short overview of the debate on trade, development and the environment. Next it provides an overview of existing approaches to conceptualizing environmental impacts from trade-related activities. After this, it provides a general introduction to impact assessment (IA) and the assessment of environmental impacts in this context. It closes with a brief overview of the assessment of environmental aspects in German development cooperation. Part II provides a more detailed review of existing frameworks and methods for assessing the environmental impacts from trade-related policies and programs

Forecasting GDP all over the World: Evidence from Comprehensive Survey Data

Comprehensive and international comparable leading indicators across countries and continents are rare. In this paper, we use a free and fast available source of leading indicators, the World Economic Survey (WES) conducted by the ifo Institute, to forecast growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 44 countries and three country aggregates separately. We come up with three major results. First, for 35 countries as well as the three aggregates a model containing one of the major WES indicators produces on average lower forecast errors compared to an autoregressive benchmark model. Second, the most important WES indicators are either the economic climate or the expectations on future economic development for the next six months. And last, 70% of all country-specific models contain WES information from at least one of the main trading partners. Thus, by allowing WES indicators from economic important partners to forecast GDP of the country under consideration, increases forecast accuracy

Forecasting GDP all over the World: Evidence from Comprehensive Survey Data

Comprehensive and international comparable leading indicators across countries and continents are rare. In this paper, we use a free and fast available source of leading indicators, the World Economic Survey (WES) conducted by the ifo Institute, to forecast growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 44 countries and three country aggregates separately. We come up with three major results. First, for 35 countries as well as the three aggregates a model containing one of the major WES indicators produces on average lower forecast errors compared to an autoregressive benchmark model. Second, the most important WES indicators are either the economic climate or the expectations on future economic development for the next six months. And last, 70% of all country-specific models contain WES information from at least one of the main trading partners. Thus, by allowing WES indicators from economic important partners to forecast GDP of the country under consideration, increases forecast accuracy

Conformal Transformation Properties of the Supercurrent in Four Dimensional Supersymmetric Theories

We investigate the superconformal transformation properties of Green functions with one or more insertions of the supercurrent in N=1 supersymmetric quantum field theories. These Green functions are conveniently obtained by coupling the supercurrent and its trace to a classical supergravity background. We derive flat space superconformal Ward identities from diffeomorphisms and Weyl transformations on curved superspace. For the classification of potential quantum superconformal anomalies in the massless Wess-Zumino model on curved superspace a perturbative approach is pursued, using the BPHZ scheme for renormalisation. By deriving a local Callan-Symanzik equation the usual dilatational anomalies are identified and it is shown that no further superconformal anomalies involving the dynamical fields are present.Comment: 35 pages, AMS-LaTex, four ps figures. Two remarks added, misprints corrected. To be published in Nuclear Physics