UN80 Is Necessary — But Without Publishing and Translation Reform, It Won’t Go Far Enough

The United Nations UN80 Initiative is a rare moment of institutional self-awareness. It acknowledges what many insiders have known for years: the UN system is expensive, slow, and structurally resistant to change.

That admission matters. But unless UN80 translates ambition into deep operational reform, particularly in publishing and translation, it risks becoming another expertly negotiated declaration that quietly changes very little.

Having worked for nearly a decade across the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization, I saw first-hand how waste is not accidental. It is designed into processes, protected by hierarchy, and reinforced by fear: fear of losing relevance, control, or power.

What UN Organisations Actually Do

For all their mandates and complexity, most UN bodies fundamentally do two things:

1. They organise meetings

2. They publish the outcomes of those meetings

Those outcomes become reports, resolutions, technical guidelines, monographs, standards, and policy documents usually in multiple languages, often under intense political scrutiny.

Publishing and translation are not support functions. They are the delivery mechanism of the UN’s mission.

And yet, they are treated as artisanal crafts rather than industrial-scale knowledge systems.

Publishing Inefficiency as Institutional Culture

At the International Agency for Research on Cancer, I implemented an XML-middle workflow for the IARC Monographs, one of the organisation’s most visible scientific outputs. The benefits were immediate: consistency, reuse, multi-format publishing, and far less manual intervention.

But other flagship publications, such as the Blue Books, refused to even consider XML. These teams remained entirely manual — down to senior staff personally deciding image placement, page by page, book by book.

This was framed as “quality control”. In reality, it was a fragile system dependent on individual authority and institutional memory, the opposite of resilience.

Translation: A Bigger Cost Than Anyone Admits

If publishing inefficiency is visible, translation inefficiency is often invisible but vastly more expensive.

Translation across the UN system costs hundreds of millions of Swiss francs per year. Salaries for senior in-house translators can exceed 200,000 CHF annually, tax-free, before overheads. This is not a criticism of translators, multilingualism is essential to the UN’s legitimacy, but of the methods imposed on them.

In many UN organisations, translation workflows are still:

• Based on Word and PDF files

• Revised on paper

• Annotated manually

• Re-keyed by junior staff

At the same time, enormous effort is invested in maintaining in-house machine translation engines and bespoke linguistic datasets — often duplicating work already solved more effectively in the commercial sector.

The result is a paradox: world-class linguists trapped in pre-digital workflows, supported by brittle technology, producing content that cannot easily be reused, analysed, or accelerated.

Why XML Changes the Economics of Translation

This is where XML publishing becomes transformative — not just for editors, but for translators.

Structured XML content:

• Preserves semantic meaning (titles, abstracts, tables, references)

• Eliminates layout noise that confuses translation tools

• Allows clean ingestion into CAT and MT systems

• Enables reliable reuse of translation memory

• Dramatically improves machine-translation accuracy

When content is consistently structured, machine translation stops being a threat and becomes a force multiplier. Human translators can focus on review, nuance, and policy sensitivity — not on fixing broken source files or deciphering inconsistent formatting.

Put bluntly: XML reduces translation effort without reducing linguistic quality.

The Real Barrier: Power, Not Technology

None of this is new. The standards exist. The tools exist. The savings are well understood.

What blocks progress is not complexity, but governance:

• Individuals whose authority depends on manual control

• IT teams incentivised to build rather than buy

• Organisations unable — or unwilling — to let go of obsolete roles

• HR systems that make it almost impossible to reduce headcount

UN80 talks about efficiency, but efficiency without the ability to simplify structures and re-skill or exit people is mathematically impossible.

Reform That Actually Delivers Impact

If UN80 is to succeed, it must confront where money, time, and effort are actually spent:

• Publishing must move to structured, XML-first or XML-middle models

• Translation must be integrated into content workflows, not bolted on

• CAT and MT tools must consume clean, semantic source content

• Manual, artisanal processes must give way to scalable systems

• Reform must include the courage to retire roles, not just rename them

XML publishing will not fix every problem at the UN.

But without it, the UN will continue to:

• Overpay for avoidable manual work

• Underuse its linguistic expertise

• Struggle to modernise translation

• And produce ever more documents through ever more fragile processes

UN80 is a necessary start.

Lean publishing and translation reform is where it either succeeds — or quietly fails, in six official languages.