Challenges And Strategies In The Translation Of Official Documents From International Organizations

In the arena of international affairs,international organizations take the leading role in encouraging governments of countries and regions to take actions on common concerns of mankind,organizing cooperation and people-to-people exchanges and seeking global consensus.Most of the documents produced by international organizations fall into the category of official documents.The official documents feature formal use of language,high intensity of information in a sentence,neutral stance,formality and rigorous choice of words.Based on translation cases collected in a UN translation project,this paper summarizes the challenges that are caused by the terms and formal expressions,the fact-oriented nature of the texts,and the words nominalization and the sentences with impersonal subjects.This paper adopts the methodology of comparison and induction by investigating into previous studies and comparing the translation draft with the revised translation.Through analyzing the underlying causes of defected translation in 17 cases,this paper summarizes translation strategies that may prove helpful in making the translation more formality-compliant,rigorous,concise and clear.Producing a translation that is more formality-compliant may require choosing the appropriate translated term and searching in parallel texts for formalized expressions;to achieve rigorousness in translation may require the translator to ensure an accurate choice of words,a clear analysis of the logic in sentence,and a fact-based attitude to take the background information of the text into account;and to make the translation clear and concise calls for strategies of highlighting the information focus,organizing the sentence components in a manner compliant with the target language,and transforming the part of speech of words.