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ABSTRACT
The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes referential reports on human-induced climate change and has an influential role on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. We propose a diachronic analysis of the French translations of the five synthesis reports published by the IPCC so far, in the light of the role of this institution in an evolving climate change regime. Translations in institutional environments are characterised by the high level of consistency in the choice of terms, where prior translations become a reference for the ensuing translations. We consider how this affects translation choices in the IPCC reports, focusing particularly on the pair of terms ‘vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’, which have become essential to refer to natural and human systems affected by climate change. The diversity in translation practices observed for this pair of terms in the first IPCC reports, is progressively replaced by the adoption of a standardised literal translation that could carry an ideological framing of the issues at stake.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the CORLI (CORpus, Langues, Interactions) consortium and the Université Grenoble Alpes Data Institute for providing support to build the corpora.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributors
Camille Biros is an Associate Professor at the Health Faculties in Grenoble (Université Grenoble Alpes) where she teaches English for Medicine, Pharmacy and Biotechnology. Her main research interests are health and environmental discourse, terminology and specialised translation.
Caroline Rossi is a Professor of Translation Studies at the Modern Languages Faculty in Grenoble (Université Grenoble Alpes), where she teaches Translation and Terminology. She is a cognitive linguist and psycholinguist and her current research interests lie with the production, reception and use of both human and machine translated texts.
Aurélien Talbot is an Associate Professor in Specialised Translation at Université Grenoble Alpes after having been a professional translator for the Mexican Embassy in France and subsequently for the Translation Department of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His research focuses on translation theories.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 As early as 1980, about the UN, Mala Tabory observed that “On a practical level, there are heavy administrative and financial burdens. The official status of numerous languages creates a huge and expensive bureaucracy and translation machinery” (Citation1980, p. 146).
2 Institutional coherence within the IPCC may be distinguished from coherence across UN organisations: it is not necessarily the case that the stabilisation identified in this paper is valid in the broader institutional context of the UN.
3 https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/ (accessed on 7 July 2020).
4 https://enb.iisd.org/download/pdf/enb12165e.pdf (accessed on 7 July 2020).
5 https://enb.iisd.org/download/pdf/enb12677e.pdf (accessed on 7 July 2020).
6 http://www.granddictionnaire.com (accessed on 7 July 2020).
7 http://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca (accessed on 7 July 2020).
8 United Nations General Assembly, 2016, “Report of the open-ended intergovernmental expert working group on indicators and terminology relating to disaster risk reduction”.
9 https://unterm.un.org/UNTERM/Display/Record/UNHQ/NA?OriginalId=96d169916ccb901785256a0100533b7e (accessed on 7 July 2020).
10 https://unterm.un.org/UNTERM/search?urlQuery=resilience (accessed on 7 July 2020).
11 H Gitay, A Suárez, RT.Watson, DJ Dokken (Eds). 2002. Climate Change and Biodiversity. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland.
12 The English NGO corpus contains 661,559 words, the French NGO corpus 592,633 words; the English UN corpus contains 1,317,576 words and the French UN corpus contains 1,490,661 words.
13 The English press corpus contains 423,459 words and the French press corpus contains 342,163 words.
14 The 254-million-word Frantext corpus contains only one occurrence (“vulnerable aux voluptés”) in a 19th century text by Sainte Beuve (Voluptés, 1834).
15 First IPCC Assessment Report published in 1990. The synthesis for which an official translation is proposed dates from 1992.
16 Second IPCC Assessment Report published in 1995.
17 Third IPCC Assessment Report published in 2001.
18 Fourth IPCC Assessment Report published in 2007.
19 Fifth IPCC Assessment Report published in 2014.
20 Accelerated Sea Level Rise.