An Internship Report On The Chinese Translation Service At United Nations

Training international talents who understand China's conditions and situations,and are conversant with multilateral affairs for international organizations is conducive not only to gaining familiarity with these organizations' operation rules but also to being better known to the world,which makes excellent contributions to the inclusive and sustainable development of the international community.In July and August 2018,the author conducted a two-month translation internship at the Chinese Translation Service in New York.This report is based on this internship.As a translation intern,the author was mainly responsible for translating the United Nations(UN)documents and conducting a terminological review based on accuracy and consistency.On the basis of these responsibilities,the author accomplished the following tasks during the internship: analyzing the application of translation technology such as United Nations Multilingual Terminology Database(UNTERM)and machine translation Tapta4 UN and reviewing UN online talent training system for further improvement.From the tasks mentioned above,the author identified the following issues and explored their possible solutions in this report.Issues such as wrong segmentation and misunderstanding and inappropriate strategies for long-sentence translation occurred and the author explored approaches including restructuring,addition,punctuation,and repetition to improve her translation skills.Additionally,the author put forward methods such as referring to UNTERM,Chinese official institutions,media authorities and official websites with multilingual versions to solve problems of inconsistency,inaccuracy,and incomplete expressions.Based on these two analyses and their solutions,the author probed into the application of translation technology for both text and term translation.She discovered that functions of UNTERM such as display of search results,user feedback,exportation and sentence example could be more satisfactory and identified that there were several potential errors of Tapta4 UNregarding segmentation rules,terminology translation and punctuation.Therefore,the author put forward possible solutions by comparing it with Chinese online terminology databases and machine translation engines,which hopefully can provide a reference value for the developers to perfect the system functions and increase the usage rates.At last,the author reviewed online training system and proposed such measures as better integrating overall framework to structure knowledge,adding more introduction to Chinese machine translation engines and improving page directing function,so as to enhance the user experience of the interns and be of a reference value for translation technology training.In this internship,the author further improved her bilingual skills and combined the translation methods with the practical operation of translation technology as a translator and a reviewer,which is of positive reference value to the author's future work.The author hopes that this report can provide some useful information: for UN intern candidates on their applications;for scholars on their translation studies;for language service providers and practitioners on understanding international translation practices;for developers of translation software on application and function improvement;for schools and universities on international talent training.