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Comment by frisco | Hacker News Reader

This is called “Special English” aka “Simple English” or “Voice of America English”. It is meant to be very clear and straightforward to understand to minimize the possibility of miscommunication and make it so that non-experts of all backgrounds can take away the important messages. Given how important the medicine supply chain is to lots of people’s daily lives, I’m sure they didn’t want this page to seem understandable only by the educated.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_English

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There is not enough of a drug, according to a drug maker. There aren’t enough ingredients to make the drug. The missing ingredients are made at a place affected by the coronavirus.

Fortunately, there are different types of drugs that can help. We are making these other drugs available.

Yeah wtf, the original was not easy at all to read. Also re your version I would use medicine instead of drug to avoid confusion.

This is not an improvement at all. Try to read the original at a slow pace, it is very straightforward but still precise.

> an issue with manufacturing of an active pharmaceutical ingredient used in the drug

is WAY WORSE than

> there aren't enough ingredients for the drug

If they are trying to say there aren't enough ingredients to make the drug then the second way is better. But that isn't the same as what the original sentence said.

The phrase 'issue with manufacturing of' covers a much wider range of problems than a shortage. Maybe they have tonnes of materials and they just need a mechanic to fix the machine for example. No shortages of anything except people in the right place at the right time.

> Special English is a controlled version of the English language first used on 19 October 1959... World news and other programs are read one-third slower than regular English. (paraphrased from Wikipedia)

This is fascinating. I had trouble understanding the FDA's article until I slowed down and imagined a newscaster reading it. (It's still really hard to skim, though. Weird phrasing.)

I work for a health-related company, and to us it's called "Health literate."

But, you're right- the idea is to write as plainly and clearly as possible so the largest number of people can understand.

As for why the drug or manufacturer wasn't named, my guess is that it's so that there isn't a run on a particular medication causing unnecessary shortages.

Or price gouging by pharmacies that still have inventory?

That's interesting, thanks.

Non mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_English

It might be special but it's not simple; it's vague and overly verbose, such that important information is buried and ambiguity is amplified.

Is there anything similar in other languages? I would love to have a similar resource for my German learning.

I'm also interested in this question of "Special $LANG" for other languages. For German learners, DW has a daily podcast Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten ("News read slowly"), which I have found invaluable.

https://m.dw.com/de/deutsch-lernen/nachrichten/s-8030

Linguistica 360 has news in slow ____ for a number of languages

https://www.linguistica360.com/

The equivalent term is "leichte Sprache". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leichte_Sprache

The websites of government agencies usually have a version in leichter Sprache, although it tends to be counterproductively hidden.

The NDR offers news using leichte Sprache: https://www.ndr.de/fernsehen/service/leichte_sprache/

Edit: or any of the other sites on this list: https://bpb.de/politik/grundfragen/politik-einfach-fuer-alle...

Further edit: there's a Wikipedia category for simplified languages, which in addition to English and German also has Latin and French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Simplified_languages

I'm glad to see this posted. When you dumb down the vast majority of media that your population consumes and make all of it essentially predigested, the average person becomes substantially less able to parse technical literature or think critically, because in the majority of the media they consume there is little required in the way of thinking.

Making things accessable to the common denominator has a generally negative effect on society IMO. This is one major reason why our U.S. schools have been falling behind for decades - they are too focused on not leaving the poor performers behind, at the cost of limiting the achievement of those above the average.

I'm honestly _more_ concerned that the FDA is dumbing things down so much that smart people have trouble understanding it.

I didn’t realize anybody here was having trouble understanding it. It looks like regular English but with no pronouns.

I had a lot of trouble understanding it until I read it 5 times. All the words just turn to soup in my brain as I read them... It's like the information density of the text isn't high enough to keep my attention or something.

The first sentence in particular has a very "the department of redundancy department" structure. Also took me a few tries to realize what it was actually saying.

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