INTRODUCTION AND JUSTIFICATION

It is no secret that the terminology of the WTO can be abstruse, even esoteric. Adding to this complication is the fact that the WTO lingo evolves at a rapid pace. Apart from having to cope with technical terms, delegates to the WTO have to become familiar with language that emerges in the heat of negotiations or at the spur of the moment, or still through a fortunate turn of phrase in the speeches of a WTO delegate. Ordinary words can acquire a life of their own in the WTO and their meaning is not at all what a non-trade initiated person would understand.

The idea of compiling a glossary of such WTO terminology to provide the lay public, or even practitioners out of touch the latest WTO fad, has been a long-standing aspiration of mine. I first started a very rough compilation when I was following the Uruguay Round negotiations as a Senior Economist at the IMF Office in Geneva. In those days I found myself trying to grapple with a multitude of words that could have been in Sanskrit. I felt as if I were learning a new language, and in such an enterprise I was in dire need of a “dictionary”. To my great surprise such a luxury was unavailable. GATT terms were only for the initiated. The aggravation grew when I began to understand and find out that the terms themselves were not complicated if one had a good definition. But I could not sit down and record all these terms, while keeping abreast with the substance of the negotiations, which kept me from advancing much on my meagre compilation of GATT terms.

When I started in my present position as Director of the Agency for International Trade Information and Cooperation (AITIC), the truncated hope of compiling a glossary came back to haunt me. I realised then the urgent need for the newly arrived delegates from less-advantaged countries to come to terms with a new language without having a rudimentary tool to facilitate their work. Thus, with the help of my colleague Christina Gmür, who as professional translator shared my frustration, work on the glossary was started again four years ago. She became more and more enthusiastic as demands grew and the need was more urgent in the context of AITIC’s day-to-day technical assistance activities, started in 1998. We suffered from the lack of such an instrument, specifically a handbook of terms in the three official languages of the WTO (English, French and Spanish) that would permit the interested person to find information not only as regards content, i.e. the definition of a term, but from the linguistic viewpoint, specifically, an equivalent in the three WTO languages.

As usual, other more important and urgent needs took time from concentrating on the glossary, which had become an obsession. So, with Cancun fast approaching, the conviction that flawlessness is the enemy of the timely, it was natural to decide that the glossary should not wait and to issue the fruits of our effort much as an “early harvest”.

NEW AND UNIQUE TOOL

It does not take long to realise that this sort of task is never finished. Not only one can always find new terms in need of definition, but also the evolution of the terminology never stops. Consequently, to be useful the glossary must remain a living document. Hence, the loose-leaf format, which facilitates additions of terms left out of the publication the first time around; and also it would make it easier to add new terms or revised definitions.

There is no lack of specialised glossaries, dictionaries and data bases of international trade and economics and other reference instruments provided by individuals and institutions, and many of these can be accessed through the Internet. However, when one looks for a particular term, such as “mainstreaming” or “quota modulation” or letter-soup acronyms such as “BISD” or “PRSP”, or obscure groups or agreements such as the “Miami Group” or the “Madrid Arrangement”, these electronic tools are not the solution. Nonetheless, we have made use of numerous electronic sources, which, although useful, made us increasingly aware that none of them fulfilled our need: an international dictionary of international trade that would include definitions of the terms more often used by the delegates in Geneva, and their equivalent in the three languages of the WTO.

Our longing was to provide as exhaustive a list as possible. However, we are well aware of the limitations of such ambitious goal. Thus, having been humbled by the mammoth task, we have settled for the lower aspiration of registering and defining terms in as concise a way as possible and on occasion seeking to allude to their specific significance for the less-advantaged country delegates. Some definitions may have a subliminal message usually a propos the discrepancies between liberalising aims and the more sobering reality.

USER GUIDE

This glossary has been produced in three separate versions: English, French and Spanish. It is organised by entries in alphabetical order. Each of the entries has its equivalent in the other two languages, followed by the definition of the term in question. To make the glossary more “user-friendly” it has been divided into three parts.

Part I contains definitions of commonly used international trade and WTO-related terms. Cross-referencing was a difficult task. We thought words that were included in the text of a definition and that had a separate definition of their own, should appear in blue to indicate this. Words not found in the text of the definition, but whose definition is also given elsewhere in the glossary appear in parenthesis preceded by “See also…” immediately below the definition. The WTO or international trade field to which the term defined belongs to is found below the “See also”, and is indented to the right in square brackets. The equivalents in the other languages are taken from the Trilingual Glossary of the WTO (Geneva, October 1997) when recorded there, and from WTO official documents found on the WTO website. Some of the terms have no official translation and we have provided our own.

Part II of the Glossary is a compilation of international organisations, groups, associations, conferences and meetings of relevance to international trade and WTO issues. It provides a guide through the labyrinth of formal and informal organisations and groups that have a direct or an indirect link to international trade. Newly arrived delegates are sometimes puzzled not only by well-established groups of which they had never heard about until arriving in Geneva, but also by the existence of “mysterious” groups whose membership, and sometimes their raison d’être, are not well-known. Delegates are interested in these groups and we are frequently asked about their composition and their objectives. Some groups, such as the “Invisible Committee”, which ceased to exist after the Seattle Ministerial meeting, have a limited endurance; others such as the “Like-Minded Group” although less active after Doha, continue to exist with changing membership according to subject or issue at stake.

Part III contains abbreviations and acronyms.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As most other AITIC products, this is the result of a team effort, and hence, several acknowledgements are in order. First thanks go to Christina Gmür, who has been the caretaker and nurse of the glossary for more years that she thought she would when she first started. During its evolution, the glossary reached monstrous proportions. We are very grateful to the tamer of the monster, David Woods, who transformed Part I into a smaller and more manageable “monstrinho”. My colleagues at AITIC, Carine Rathier and Samuel Jordan are to be commended for their patience in checking translations and also for providing useful comments on the contents. Finally our appreciation goes to María and Marcos of Intermediatica, who provided the design of the cover and handled with great efficiency the logistics of production.

Esperanza Durán
Geneva, August 2003