Summary

  • A European proposal would accelerate machine translation at the ITU, with human oversight adjusted to the quality and permanence required of each translation.
  • The draft also puts a PP-30 finish line on harmonizing the Union’s webpages in its six official languages.

The ITU has six official languages and a familiar office problem: the document arrives before the translation does. Europe’s addendum 28 to contribution 75, listed in the Plenipotentiary record, proposes a faster machine and a human holding the red pencil. It would accelerate machine translation while requiring oversight in degrees that reflect the quality and permanence needed from the text. A fleeting notice and a definition meant to survive several conference cycles should not receive identical treatment.

That is a new instruction. The 2022 Resolution 154 already promised equal footing for Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. It asked the Secretary-General to examine innovative translation methods, report their advantages and disadvantages, and monitor translation quality and spending. It also required event contributions to go online in their original language within three working days, even ahead of translation. The European draft moves from examining technology to accelerating deployment, then places a human judgment about the translated text in the same sentence.

The human judgment has a particular object. Technical and operational terminology remains an English-first production line in the proposal: study groups would continue that work in English, while the ITU Coordination Committee for Terminology would examine English proposals and approve other official-language renderings where needed. The old resolution already gave the committee the latter role. The new draft makes the English-only study-group stage explicit. Faster translation can carry a draft across the language boundary; the committee still decides what an enduring term means there.

Europe also asks the ITU to finish harmonizing the General Secretariat and Sector webpages across the six languages by PP-30. The harmonization ambition was already in the 2022 text, without that conference deadline. A language promise on a home page is cheap; keeping six navigable, current sites aligned has a recurring cost. The proposal encourages multilingual administrative documents and staff skills within existing budget resources, so the money question does not leave the room when the software arrives.

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