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108 Marie-Josée de Saint Roberta corpus-driven translation tool would be more appropriate for translators thana sentence-driven tool such as TRADOS. A small number of individual expertMultiTrans licenses were bought in 2005 together with less powerful web licensesaccessible to all translators. In 2007, the results of a new pilot project on MultiTransshowed that the CAT tool received low satisfaction scores from translators as theirexpectations concerning the tool did not coincide with what the tool was providingthem with: their idea of having readily available automatic alignment of twolanguage versions of the same document whenever desirable was not matched by aproduct which proposes a text hyperlinked to all identical or almost identical segmentsthat appear in previously translated documents and that can be selected fordirect insertion into the translation draft, in any given pair of languages. What mayappear as settling for less may be linked with the very nature of the translation processin multilateral diplomatic settings where linguistic and pragmatic constraintson the one hand, and technical constraints on the other, play an important role.2. Linguistic and pragmatic constraintsSeveral linguistic constraints are obstacles to the straightforward application oflanguage technologies to translation work. Some are quite obvious, while othersare specific to international organisations.2.1 Word choiceTranslation cannot be reduced to the mechanical substitution of one set of terms inone language by a similar set in another language. Subjects discussed at the UnitedNations are ground breaking and established terms may not be readily available inall official languages. The search for correct terms to designate new concepts is along and often non-linear process, which varies from one language combinationto another and crucially depends on the translator’s mastery of term history. Asa result, in all language combinations, a translator working with a CAT tool maybe confronted with several alternative equivalents that he has to spend time toevaluate whereas a translator working without a CAT tool may know the ultimatelyestablished equivalents he needs right away.2.1.1 Level of language adequacyWriting, and therefore translating, for the United Nations means addressing oneselfto a wide variety of document users: diplomats, scientists, media specialists,law experts, administrative officers. The linguistic distinctiveness of the UnitedNations resides in the level of language used, which has to be acceptable to all