Terminological Equivalence and Harmonization Strategies in a Specialized Parallel Corpus of UN Documents

Abstract

Terminological equivalence is one of the central issues in multilingual institutional communication, since the accuracy of a translated term directly influences the interpretation of the concept that it represents. This issue is especially important in United Nations documents, where legal, political, diplomatic, humanitarian and administrative concepts must be rendered consistently across languages. The problem investigated in this study arises from the fact that a single institutional concept may be expressed through several target-language equivalents, while these variants do not always demonstrate identical semantic scope, functional value or institutional status. Consequently, terminological variation may gradually develop into terminological inconsistency. The present study examines the nature of terminological equivalence and proposes harmonization strategies based on a specialized parallel corpus of UN documents. The research integrates corpus linguistics, terminology studies, translation theory, semantic analysis and contrastive linguistics.