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ITU Language Tools

As part of its commitment to multilingualism and the use of all six official languages of the Union (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) on an equal footing, ITU makes use of a range of language tools and technologies to facilitate the work of translators, authors and editors. For more information and access, please contact LING-IT-support@itu.int.

ITU style guides

The purpose of the ITU style guides in the official languages of the Union is to codify ITU practices in the drafting, translation and editing of ITU documents. The style guides will facilitate the work of authors, text processors, translators, editors and proofreaders and ensure the uniformity of documents in each ITU official language.

Arabic Style Guide (under developement)
Chinese Style Guide
English Style Guide
French Style Guide (under developement)
Russian Style Guide
Spanish Style Guide

Terminology databases

The ITU Terms and Definitions page provides a useful collection of technical terms specific to ITU's work, with reference in particular to ITU-R and ITU-T texts.

At the start of 2022, ITU joined UNTERM, the multilingual terminology database maintained jointly by the UN Secretariat and some specialized agencies of the UN system. ITU is responsible for the domains related to ICTs and telecommunications within UNTERM. Most entries are currently available in all six official languages. Relevant entries from TERMITE (the former in-house termbase) are additionally being transferred to UNTERM.

Machine translation

Machine translation is increasingly used by ITU staff and delegates to complement the work of professional human translators and expand the scope of content available in translation.

ITU Translate is a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) engine developed in-house and launched in September 2019 as a joint project between ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Bureau and the Conferences & Publications department. The tool utilizes the Azure Custom Translation as a translation engine, exclusively fine-tuned on ITU data. This corpus includes the whole set of English to French/Spanish/Arabic/Chinese/Russian available bitexts. The ITU Translate ecosystem comprises the following services: segment translation, document translation, and website translation.

Computer Aided Translation (CAT)

ITU in-house and freelance translators use eLUNa, a CAT tool developed by the UN as part of their gText project. eLUNa is a web-based translation tool, combining access to previously translated sentences, terminology and machine translation.

Translators also use LogiTermWeb, a search tool provided by Terminotix which finds previously translated sentences. The internal server is accessible only inside ITU or via PC remote, and is updated every night. The external server is available for freelancers working outside ITU during the period of their contract with ITU.