Writing for the United Nations keeping translation in mind
What is it about?
Although it is well known that a text written in a language can be translated into any other language, it is less known that the use of official terminology, nomenclature, and of properly referenced quotations or paraphrases is essential for accuracy and efficiency in translation, all the more so with the advent of machine-assisted translation and translation expert systems and the need for post-editing. When drafting reports for the United Nations, officials and experts from different parts of the world, although no doubt very cautious in their use of terms and phraseology, may depart from the terminology or nomenclature selected for the United Nations or may paraphrase legally-binding texts in an approximate way, which in turn creates unwanted ambiguity and potential non-concordance between the original text and its renditions in other target languages. The aim of the paper is twofold: to focus on the need for drafters of United Nations documents to have at their disposal an authoring system that helps them provide texts that are easily processed by their readership, including their painstaking reader, the translator; to discuss issues raised by source-text improvement and language standardization. A description of the official documentation production chain, adopted ever since the creation of the universal body, is provided in order to show how inter-linguistic accuracy has been pursued by various actors along the processing chain: documentation managers, who receive the original document to be published and translated and who make sure that the document meets the requirements; editors, who proofread the original text and correct light errors (requests for correction of substantive errors are submitted to authors); reference and documentation staff, who search the background material mentioned in the original text to save time to translators (some parts of this search are now automatically processed); terminologists, who identify the proper equivalents for terms to be used in each target language in any of the varied specialized areas covered by multilateral diplomacy; translators, whose priorities are: accuracy, consistency, as well as other issues in institutional translation; computer-assisted publishing staff, who also act as proofreaders of the translated texts. Greater efficiency could be reached in translation if better written originals were provided. A discussion is presented in the paper of what “better written originals” means in an organization which has six official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish, but one predominantly used language in drafting, including by non-native speakers, and five other languages considered as translation languages mainly.
Why is it important?
Authors of official texts submitted to international organizations in one official language know that their texts will be translated into the other official languages but they may not be aware of the role they play in the smooth processing of their texts by editors and translators. An authoring expert system is under consideration that would help document drafters identify proper terminology, nomenclature and reference material. The article discusses issues that such expert systems raise.