Authentic in English Only: The Necessity of Trilingual System in the WTO

Abstract

This review paper questions the necessity of trilingual system in the World Trade Organisation (WTO), inspired by the authentic in English only on the cover of the US submission in the US-Gambling case. WTO, as the delegation of more than 160 countries, its official languages (i.e., English, French, Spanish) are rather Euro-centric. Even though the WTO has trilingual corpus and database, its trilingual systems face many problems, such as discrepancies in law translations, incoherent references, and the dominance of English usage. This review also mentions other international organisations which have multiple official languages and puts forward some possible approaches to improving the language diversity in the WTO. One of the measures is to start from establishing other languages (e.g., Arabic and Chinese) corpus and database, and interpretation and translation working station of other languages as a trial. The language data from both sides can serve each other, paving the way to the future language prosperity.