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Chapter 7. CAT tools in international organisations 113mechanisms as the risk is real to follow the original languages to the detriment oflegibility or communication effectiveness in the target languages.2.4 Functional adequacyEach committee or body has specific ways of expressing an idea in order to reach aconsensus within its respective audience or circle. Underlying references to protagonists,former meetings, and earlier decisions discussed by committee membersbut not explicitly mentioned in the text play an important role in editing andtranslation. Sometimes the reasoning of a rapporteur, aspeakeroranauthor,or an amalgam of lengthy sentences couched in simple terms that are perfectlyunintelligible to the outsider, i.e., someone who has not participated from thebeginning in the discussions, has to be left untouched in the original. Acceptabilityof a translated text does not come solely from its grammatical and semanticwell-formedness. It must also be appropriate within the United Nations context.A translated text must, like its original, follow a highly standardised path: it mustconvey the impression of having been written by a long-time member, perfectlyfamiliar with the background in which the text has been drafted, even if it is deliberatelyvague or obscure. In fact most United Nations texts cannot be interpretedwithout prior knowledge of the particular political framework in which they appear.The sociopolitical motivation and rationale behind a text are part of theunwritten constraints imposed on communicative competence at the United Nations.Developments in artificial intelligence are not perceived to have reached thislevel of refinement. As Peral (2002) puts it:translation is based on finding ‘functional equivalences’ that require linguistic,intertextual, psychological and narrative competence; only human beings arecapable of determining ‘functional equivalences’; productivity in translation istherefore intrinsically linked to the capacity of the translator to find the adequatefunctional equivalence, i.e., it is based on the quality of the translator.Occasionally functional adequacy does not coincide with grammaticality, asshown in Jastrab (1984), since political (functional) adequacy has priority overmorphology and syntax. Translators and revisers are confronted with the challengeof conveying non-grammatical structures that result from negotiations fromone language into another. Revising the content of translation memories or improvingtextcorporahastoberesistedasitmayleadtounwarrantedchangesthatmay have political consequences.These constraints conflict with the concept of translation reuse for translationpurposes on which most commercially available alignment tools and translationmemory systems are based, especially when document traceability (i.e., the