Whenever one of the principal organs of the United Nations -be it the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, or the Trusteeship Council - or one of their subsidiary bodies - more than 50 in number - is meeting, the staff members of the Department for General Assembly and Conference Management are in action. Whether in open formal session, in informal consultations or in closed-door meetings, the intergovernmental bodies of the United Nations system depend on the Department and its services for the “grease” that keeps the wheels of multilateral diplomacy running.

The most general function of the Department is to provide delegates of Member States and the intergovernmental bodies with all the services that such meetings require for their smooth functioning. Those services include conference planning and organization, meeting room facilities, interpretation services, documentation and meeting records, authoritative advice on procedural questions and on the orderly conduct of meetings, notes for the chairman of the particular meeting, and the institutional memory of past practices, among others. Without those services, no meeting could take place.

Documentation is the life-blood of virtually all gatherings at the United Nations. It sets the agenda and the programme of work for the meeting, the questions to be considered and the order and manner of their consideration. In a series of reports prepared before the opening of the meeting (pre-session documentation), it provides the basis of the deliberations. In-session documents (draft resolutions and decisions) reflect the results of discussions as delegates reach agreements. Following the meeting, a report is prepared that gives a summation of the discussion and of all actions taken, including any recommendations made or resolutions adopted. United Nations documents may be drafted, edited, translated, printed and distributed in all six official languages, and sometimes processed overnight. Without its documentation, the work of a United Nations intergovernmental body may grind to a halt.

The provision of documentation involves the following processes:

This first step in document processing involves reviewing the mandates from intergovernmental bodies for the preparation of reports, allocating the responsiblilities for document preparation among author departments, determining admissibility of documents and monitoring submission to ensure timely availability of documents for all meetings.

This function covers the scheduling and monitoring of the processing of documents in all official languages simultaneously, in accordance with the requirements of the meetings and ensuring full compliance with rules governing control and limitation of documentation.

Editors ensure that texts are clear, comprehensible, grammatically and orthographically correct, that all footnotes and other references are correct and that texts conform to United Nations style.

Documents often contain text based on material previously translated or references to resolutions or other published materials. The proper referencing of the texts helps ensure correct translation and speeds up processing. Increasing specialization and in-depth consideration of technical questions means that new vocabulary is constantly being formed, and terminology lists in all languages must be kept up to date.

A document drafted in one of the six official languages of the United Nations (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) is usually translated into the other five. Some core documents are also translated into German. When a document is required urgently for ongoing deliberations of the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, for example, or for one of their subsidiary bodies, a provisional translation is made quickly by translators working in an area in close proximity to the conference room. These translations are subsequently reviewed before they are issued in final form. Although United Nations translators are often required to work to tight deadlines, every effort is made to ensure the highest standards of quality and accuracy.

After being edited and translated, documents are sent for text processing. The presentation of documents in all the official languages of the Organization conforms to typographic standards developed to ensure legibility, clear presentation of data and easy document navigation and search. Final formatted versions in camera-ready and electronic form are sent to the Reproduction Section for printing and to the optical disk system for archiving.

Editors ensure that all six language versions of resolutions and decisions and other official records comply with United Nations editorial standards and, operating multilingual teams, paly a crucial role in maximizing consistency accross languages.

Working in the six official languages, the Copy Preparation and Proof-reading Section desktop-publishes or prepares for external typesetting and proof-reads a variety of materials, including publications for sale and public information materials.

The Publishing Section, operating around the clock in three shifts, produces all parliamentary documentation required for meetings at Headquarters and for entitled recipients of documents, including Permanent and Observer Missions, Government offices, libraries and other national and international organizations. It also prints most of the publications for sale, as well as posters, leaflets and other public information materials. The Publishing Section provides documentation to meetings participants. It also distributes documents and other printed materials to all recipients inside and outside the Organization and maintains an electronic document collection in the optical disk system.

An international organization must have effective ways to overcome language barriers to avoid becoming a Tower of Babel. Since almost every country in the world is represented at the United Nations, it is not an exaggeration to say that the United Nation is a microcosm of the world. The Organization uses six official languages in its intergovernmental meetings and documents, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish; the Secretariat uses two working languages, English and French.

Statements made in an official language at a formal meeting are interpreted simultaneously into the other official languages of the body concerned by United Nations interpreters. If a delegation wishes to speak in a language that is not an official language, it must supply an interpreter to interpret the statement or translate it into one of the official languages. It is then rendered into the other languages by a relay system.

Documents are produced in the six official languages and are issued simultaneously when all the language versions are available.