Plain and Easy Language as a means to increase health literacy on COVID-19: A contrastive analysis of English and German texts

During the current health crisis, access to medical information is paramount. However, specialized content needs to be handled carefully in order to be understandable outside circles of experts, and this is all the more so for certain categories. In this context, Easy and Plain Language – both forms of intralingual translation – texts are being used as a means to increase comprehensibility and thus foster health literacy on COVID-19. The present paper aims at analyzing some instances of these texts in English and German, so as to pinpoint their characteristics and highlight their crucial role in information democratization, not only with respect to this pandemic, but well beyond it. In fact, despite sharing the same purpose, such language varieties have different traits and traditions in distinct countries. Furthermore, the analysis also highlights that the abovementioned varieties have different realizations in the framework of the same designation, as well.