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112 Marie-Josée de Saint Robertleft in original text. Only they are required to work in their native language thatis one of the official languages. Due to lack of resources at the United Nations,only a small portion of all documents is edited prior to being translated (e.g., documentsprepared by the Human Rights Council and Treaty bodies). Translatorsconsequently do act as filters for grammatical correctness and language consistencyas they work on the texts to be translated. As a result, they often improveoriginal texts whenever the drafters or submitting officers accept their changesin the original documents. A translation memory processing straightforwardly adocument to be translated prior to the perusal of a translator may not detect inappropriateuse of terms or syntactic errors in the original language as errors done bynon-natives are mostly unpredictable, given the number of native languages spokenat the United Nations 6 and the wide differences in language mastery from onedrafter to the other. Even when an automatic term-checking system is appended tothe translation memory, it may not be as efficient as a human eye either. The feartherefore is that a computer-assisted translation system may add more mistakes tothe original ones, which will then be even harder to detect and correct.2.3 Stylistic interferencesTranslators have not only to follow the original text but also apply the stylisticrules of the language into which they translate. For instance, among writing stylesone can mention the fact that repetitious words are not considered as poor stylein English but are definitely considered poor style in French. The English sentence(16) presents a repetition of the word ‘aircraft’ which the French rendering in (17)would avoid:(16) the shooting down of civil aircraft by a military aircraft(17) la destruction d’aéronefs civils par un appareil militaireIn translating back the French sentence in (17) into English, the English-languagetranslator has to reduce the number of stylistic variants that French requires.Hobbs (2008) shows how required usage is acquired by United Nations translators,a process based on daily practice, coaching and revising over the years. Ittakes decades to become an accomplished linguist at the United Nations and sometranslators never reach that stage. Languages outside the Indo-European familyof languages, such as Arabic and Chinese, need to develop stricter quality control6. As far as United Nations staff members are concerned, over 120 nationalities are represented,which gives an order of magnitude of linguistic variation and of the multilingual speechcommunity within the United Nations Secretariat.