The Austrian government's effort to simplify the language of its public documents has become known as "verwaltungsvereinfachungsmassnahmen."

Somehow, I doubt it. If you google the word in question you get six pages, all of which are in English.

Vereinfachung = simplification, Maßnahme = measure, and Vereinfachungsmaßnahmen 'simplification measures' does get 291 hits.

One is the Austrian Justice Ministry, with the glorious phrase spezifisch auf dieses Massenverfahren zugeschnittene Vereinfachungsmaßnahmen im Zusammenhang mit dem Gesamtziel der Novelle, and my dictionary would break if I stopped to look up all those.

No hits for the putative longer word, though it's no more complex than its translation 'administrative simplification measures'.

Yes, I agree with aput. It's basically a compound of three words. German orthography simply eschews the two spaces we'd use in the English translation. The Guardian had an article in which the word was attributed to a Viennese official.There are a lot of hits for Verwaltungsvereinfachung, too. There is an organization in Germany called KGSt which stands for Kommunale Gemeinschaftsstelle für Verwaltungsvereinfachung. It seems to mean administrative simplification in general, rather than anything specific to language or bureaucratese.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: jheem,

quote: If you google the word in question you get six pages

Actually, you'll get 203. It's merely that the display is shortened, Google stating, "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 7 already displayed."

But show all 203 and you'll find that all but five of them come various subparts of a single site. Apparantly their playing games to boost their google-priority.

P.S. I'd noted the 203 number when checking this out earlier today, but interestingly, it had dropped to 157 by the time I got around to making this post. Apparently Google is countering the game-playing.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: wordnerd,

jheem, the article you site from The Guardian is in fact an Associated Press article used by a few dozen newspapers of which The Guardian is but one. In GoogleNews there are 43 hits, 41 of which are identical sentences (beginning with the words "Ironically, though").