Challenges To Translators In Understanding UN Documents And Tentative Solutions

UN documents cover complicated topics and information that pose challenges to translators in accurately understanding the original texts due to a series of factors,including both linguistic and non-linguistic factors.Misunderstandings sometimes occur when a translator overlooks the fact that the original texts,normally written in English to be translated into other UN languages,including Chinese,which this paper deals with,may not have been perfectly written because some of the authors work in English as their second or even third language.Based on a case study of some Chinese translation texts the author of this paper has done during an online internship program offered by the UN Chinese Translation Service in New York,this paper discusses the linguistic and non-linguistic challenges in understanding the original UN documents that a translator may frequently find hard to deal with.Five factors are analyzed: 1)complexity of UN background knowledge;2)translator's misuse of the UNTERM;3)complicated sentence structures in the original text;4)logical ambiguity caused by prepositional phrases;and 5)frequent use of English nominal structures and unclear verbal expressions.Through comparisons of the draft translation done by the author of this paper and the revised version done by experienced translators from the UN Chinese Translation Service in New York,and using Count Wordsworth,a statistical tool,this paper analyses some major challenges to translators in accurately understanding the information contained in UN documents and proposes tentative solutions to such challenges,which are “extensive background knowledge research”,“using UNTREM with judgment”,“sorting out complicated English sentence structures”,“analyzing logical relations expressed with prepositional phrases with a focus on the context and background knowledge”,and“properly understanding complicated nominal structures and unclear verbal expressions”.