Opening remarks - ITU Council Working Group on Languages (CWG-LANG)

 

Distinguished colleagues,
Ladies and gentlemen,

 

On behalf of the Secretary-General it is my pleasure to welcome you to this meeting of the CWG on languages, those on-site as well as on-line. Thank you for joining us. And thanks to you chairman for taking on this responsibility, and thanks also to the nominated vice-chairmen for offering their support. The Secretariat looks forward to working closely with you.

The Council Working Group on Languages provides the Membership and the Secretariat with an opportunity to discuss the key issue of multilingualism, one of the pillars of the United Nations.

The Secretariat is grateful to the CWG-LANG for its continued constructive collaboration with the Secretariat in accordance with its Terms of Reference in Resolution 1372, adopted by Council-16. Over the last month ITU’s C&P Department has conducted pilot projects for website translation with three Administrations: Egypt, China and Argentina that generously offered to help make content available in their respective languages. Allow me to thank them, and the Chairman and Vice-Chairmen, and through them the different linguistic groups, for their support and cooperation.

This meeting has a very important agenda, as we will be discussing the annual report of the Secretary-General to Council-17, submitted via this Council Working Group, on current and planned budgetary, procedural and innovative actions impacting the multilingual operations at ITU, as mandated by the revisions of Resolution 154 (Rev. Busan, 2014) and Council Resolution 1372.

The report is intended to update the Council on the actions and initiatives to lead to a more economical, efficient, multilingual and greener ITU. It also answers some of the questions and concerns you raised during the last meeting in February 2016.

Since then, special attention has been devoted to the multilingual aspects of the ITU website, as Member States clearly recognized its importance for all our stakeholders and the public in general.

Like all other organizations working in the six official UN languages, ITU has had to completely review its web policy and develop innovative approaches to knowledge creation, innovation, optimal use of language resources and creativity.

The Secretariat has reviewed the practices in other organizations, both public and private, and has develop solutions that we believe can satisfy requirements whilst respecting budgetary provisions.

The result is a phased solution that would ultimately lead to the publication of ITU web pages in the six official languages simultaneously, with the same conditions of functionality and navigation.

We look forward to hearing your views, ideas, and advice on how we might “do more with less”.

I wish you a successful and productive meeting.