Réunion annuelle internationale sur la traduction et la terminologie assistées par ordinateur - "From end to end: tools and technology as links in the chain"

Ladies and Gentlemen:

A warm welcome to the Palais des Nations!

Or perhaps better yet: welcome back! After all, it has been almost 20 years since UN Geneva had the pleasure to last host the International Annual Meeting on Computer-Assisted Translation and Terminology.

I am glad to see so many of you here today and I very much hope we will not let another two decades pass by before seeing us again.

The Palais feels like a fitting surrounding for your discussions, not least because the multilateral machinery of the UN depends on multilingual conference management support on a daily basis.
We at UN Geneva are a major conference centre. We provide the physical infrastructure, as well as the conference expertise required to ensure events are properly planned and smoothly serviced. Last year alone, we serviced a total of 12,800 meetings in Geneva and beyond. 3,200 of these were with interpretation, a 30% increase over the past decade. And 99% of all documents were submitted on time, despite continuous cuts to our resources.

This would not have been possible without the embrace of technological innovation - from planning decision support and computer-assisted translation, to digital publication and new tools such as Indico.

Looking ahead, it is safe to say that the role of technology and the importance of innovation will only grow in this space.

In a physical sense, because we are progressing well with the Strategic Heritage Plan - our ambitious project to modernize and update the Palais to ensure it remains ready to play its critical role in this century as it did in the last.

And in a more political sense, because the importance of Geneva as the operational heart of the international system is growing in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Almost 1000 days into implementation, the 2030 Agenda and its 17 Goals have become the universal blueprint for everything we do here in International Geneva and beyond.

Crucially, the 2030 Agenda serves a role not unlike to what is alluded to in your Leitmotif this year - it links the chain from end to end. It helps integrate our work along the vertical axis from the grassroots to the global level. And it improves our horizontal collaboration across civil society, academia, the private and the public sectors.

Technology plays an essential role in making this integration possible.

But if technology has produced benefits completely unthinkable until only a few years ago, technological progress has also produced challenges we have only just begun to fathom.

Technological progress is Janus-faced - for every opportunity gives rise to a daunting challenge.
Technology can deliver the entirety of human knowledge to a child in a remote village on a single hand-held device. But it also equipped some governments and corporations with the means for surveillance of almost anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Artificial intelligence - to quote the CEO of Google - will be as profound for humanity’s progress as electricity or fire. But the McKinsey Global Institute has calculated that 375 million people, that’s 14% of the global workforce, could have their jobs automated away by 2030.

The world of language professionals is a place where the future is the present. Neural Machine Translation is a reality. But that does not mean that the role of the human translator is becoming obsolete. In fact, I am cautious of overzealous predictions of technology’s march in the space of language.

Translators, to borrow from the American writer Paul Auster, are the “shadow heroes that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who enable us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world.” The very functioning of multilateral diplomacy depends on professionals like yourselves to convey the nuanced meaning of what is said, not just to offer the literal translation.

And if relations go awry, interpreters and translators have forever been the handy scapegoats for diplomats. The éminence grise of Italian diplomacy in medieval Venice, Alvise Contarini, famously refused to use anything other than Italian in his communications, so that he could always blame his interpreter in case of misunderstanding. In fact, I have heard that it is from there that the parallel in Italian emerged between translators and traitors - traduttore and traditore.

Human translators and interpreters will remain indispensable links in the linguistic chain - and not just because diplomats will need you to take the blame. You will remain indispensable because the world of diplomacy includes ever more actors - from civil society to business people – who often use specific terminology unknown to ‘outsiders’. Thus, the need for skilful interpretation and translation will become ever more critical.

But that does not mean your role will not radically change. You are in a profession where the imperative of staying up to date with the rapid progress of technology is mission critical.
In the linguistic field as indeed everywhere else, our goal must be to combine technology and public policy to ensure that innovation works for the good of humankind. We need to humanize technology. I prefer that to ‘technologizing’ humanity.

I look forward to your contributions to this important project and wish you much success in your discussions in the coming days.

Thank you.