Result of Service

The incumbent is responsible to support in the delivery of an Arabic/English final version of a document, ensuring that the text is linguistically correct and conveys the meaning as clearly as possible.

Work Location

UN-House ESCWA / Hybrid

Expected duration

3 Months

Duties and Responsibilities

This position is located within the Conference Management Section (CMS), Resource Management and Service Development Division (RMSDD) of the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA). The editorial assistant will report directly to a senior Reviser and the overall guidance of Chief CMS. The IC will be responsible for the following duties: • Coordinate the team work in editorial assistance, proofreading and copy preparation; • Adjust texts after editing and translation in order to improve the quality of output, by adapting the input text to be a closer match to the original texts thereby helping the MT engine perform better; • Ensure that the text is written with fixed rules, such as simplifying structures by using short sentences, avoiding complex or ambiguous syntactic structures and ensuring term consistency; • Analyze the content, sentence by sentence, to flag issues that will be problematic in translation; tags elements in the source text that are not to be translated; • Conduct proofreading and copy preparation for a range of content, in accordance with the established standards and practices; • Assure continuity of style, accuracy of content, and conformity with established United Nations grammar, style and typography; • Check translations of technical terms and terminology to ensure that they are accurate and remain consistent throughout the whole translation; • Use on-line resources as research tools throughout the process; • Provide a grammatically correct, well-expressed final version of the text; • Perform other language functions, as needed and requested.

Qualifications/special skills

A High School diploma or equivalent is required. A first-level university degree in language, terminology, information management or language technology in combination with qualifying training in web writing and publishing is desirable. All candidates must submit a copy of the required educational degree. Incomplete applications will not be reviewed. A minimum of seven years of experience in language related functions and computer assisted translation: strong background in syntax and morphology; good understanding of programming and linguistics; ability to solve problems in areas related to machine translation, grammar and style checking, document processing and information retrieval, and Computer-Assisted Language Learning is required.

Languages

English and French are the working languages of the United Nations Secretariat; and Arabic is a working language of ESCWA. For this position, fluency in English and Arabic is required. Knowledge of French is desirable. Note: “Fluency” equals a rating of ‘fluent’ in all four areas (speak, read, write, and understand) and “Knowledge of” equals a rating of ‘confident’ in two of the four areas.

Additional Information

Recruitment for this position is on a local basis. The incumbent is required to have the legal right to live and work in the specified working location.

No Fee

THE UNITED NATIONS DOES NOT CHARGE A FEE AT ANY STAGE OF THE RECRUITMENT PROCESS (APPLICATION, INTERVIEW MEETING, PROCESSING, OR TRAINING). THE UNITED NATIONS DOES NOT CONCERN ITSELF WITH INFORMATION ON APPLICANTS’ BANK ACCOUNTS.