Text to answer question.

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city’s walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

[…]

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.

White, E.B. (1999) Here is New York. New York: The Little Book Room, with adaptations.

Considering the text, mark the following item.

The word “bestow” could be correctly replaced with exchange.

Text to answer question.

Towards a fairer distribution

Translation and interpretation in matters of diplomacy is tricky. Language enthusiasts particularly enjoy the story of the Treaty of Wuchale, signed between Ethiopia and Italy in 1889. The text didn’t read the same in Amharic and Italian. The former guaranteed Ethiopia’s king Menelik II a good measure of autonomy in conducting foreign affairs. The latter established an Italian protectorate with no flexibility. The culprit: one verb, forming a permissive clause in Amharic and a mandatory one in Italian. Six years later, the differing interpretations led to war. Ethiopia won.

If only the Ethiopians and Italians had modern translators at their side. Treaty translation is big business today. The European Union, for example, spends an estimated €300m annually on translating between its 23 official languages. (While this is a big chunk of money, it’s less than 1% of the EU’s annual budget.) Three of those—English, French, and German—are working languages in most meetings. In reality, English is most commonly used. But because each document must be faithfully recreated in each of the EU’s 23 languages, creating authentic versions can be expensive and time-consuming. Thankfully, most problems are dealt with in procès-verbal, a way to introduce technical corrections to treaties without revisiting negotiations. It might still delay matters. Last year, for example, Ireland’s ratification of an EU treaty was delayed by grammatical errors in the Irish version. There are obvious trade-offs to language equality, but the EU has calculated that the delays and costs are worth it.

The United Nations should revisit its own calculations. It has just six official and two working languages. The task of translation here in Geneva, home to most UN organs, is thus decidedly simpler. The UN’s official languages are geographically diverse—combined, native speakers of Arabic, English, French, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish number over 2.2 billion. But the two working languages are bound to tradition. The persistence of French is attributed to its history as the “language of diplomacy”. In the hallways of the New York headquarters, English is (naturally) favored, and French is preferred in Geneva. Treaties registered with the United Nations Treaty Series are always translated into French and English. Documents are always provided in French and English. This city’s Geneva Conventions, written in equally authentic French and English versions, laid part of the groundwork for the international system.

Towards a fairer distribution. Available at: <www.economist.com>.

Retrieved on: Aug. 15. 2019, with adaptations.

Concerning the grammatical and semantic aspects of the text, mark the following item.

The word “former” refers to someone who created the Treaty.