Translating a marketing campaign and translating a UN Security Council Resolution call for very different approaches and methodologies, even though they do share some similarities. Firstly, a marketing campaign can be, and often is, translated very loosely. The purpose of translating an advertisement is to cater to the attitudes and preferences of a specific population and/or culture to maximize sales amongst that population. This is known as localization. As a result, advertisements are almost never translated word-for-word or even sense-for-sense. A lot of times translators come up with a totally different slogan or image when advertising to a specific audience. In fact, translating slogans word-for-word has often led to comical results. For example, when “Got Milk?” was translated to Spanish to cater to the Mexican audience, it literally meant “Are you lactating?” and a Scandinavian vacuum company translated their advertisement into English as “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.” Translating UN documents, on the other hand, requires perfect exactness with no room for creativity. It has to be translated word-for-word (but in a way that makes sense in the target language) and specialized terms, such as ‘adopted,’ ‘recalling,’ ‘proclaims,’ etc. have only one correct equivalent in the target language. To find this equivalent, we need to search for it on the UN website and see how it was translated in already-existing documents. In fact, every term or phrase that can be translated in more than one manner should be searched for to exclude the possibility of creating a wrong translation. This makes UN document translation different not only from advertisement translations but from most other types of translation as well. Translating novels and even journalism allows for some room for maneuver, even though the information itself cannot be edited in any way, while translating UN documents leaves no room for creativity whatsoever. Secondly, UN documents have a very specific format, and this format needs to be preserved without any modification while translating to the target language. I think this “rigidity” is necessary to avoid any political and legal loopholes that would arise if there was more than one way to translate the documents.
