UNTERM is the official global terminology portal of the United Nations. It provides terminology and nomenclature in subjects relevant to the work of the United Nations in the six official UN languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish — to ensure a consistent use of official United Nations terms, system-wide.

UNTERM was created by the Department for General Assembly and Conference Management (DGACM) to support the provision of high-quality language services for the intergovernmental meetings of the UN. Over the years, the UNTERM portal has expanded, and it now incorporates the terminology of the four UN duty stations of DGACM (New York, Geneva, Vienna and Nairobi), the United Nations regional commissions and UN agencies such as IMO, ITU, WHO, WMO and UNESCO, taking UNTERM one step closer to becoming the “go-to” portal for official terminology in the United Nations system.

The portal is accessed around the clock by users all over the world, including translators, editors, interpreters and other United Nations staff, delegates and individual users from all countries. UNTERM features hundreds of thousands of terms, including official country names, phraseology datasets and a collection of geographical and proper names. It also functions as a terminology management system that enables the collaborative creation and updating of terminology, including through a mechanism for user feedback and a queue. For historical reasons, the portal also contains a small set of terms in German and Portuguese.

Language professionals working on the content of multilingual texts are mandated by the General Assembly to use terminology that “reflects the latest linguistic norms and terminology of the official languages in order to ensure the highest quality” in translation and interpretation, and to ensure that the terminology portal is maintained and updated  “in order to ensure its availability to United Nations staff, Member States and the general public, with a view to achieving harmonization of the terminology used at all United Nations duty stations” (resolution 70/9). To implement this mandate,  DGACM created UNTERM by merging pre-existing glossaries, card-based databases and multilingual terminology systems in order to create a global terminology system that would eliminate overlap, repetitions and inaccuracies in terminological records. To this end, a terminological distribution of labour was put in place to capitalize on the expertise of all participating entities and to enable a collaborative way of doing terminology work at the global level. Each entity is now able to focus on its own areas of specialization, creating and updating records for terms that fall under its scope of work. As a result, UNTERM provides reliable and consistent multilingual terminology entries, thus contributing to multilingual dialogue and cooperation among United Nations Member States, international organizations, intergovernmental bodies and civil society.

The UNTERM Portal is managed by the DGACM gText programme and is integrated into eLUNa (electronic Languages of the United Nations), the UN computer-assisted translation tool, which automatically identifies, highlights and hyperlinks UNTERM terminology records to increase the accuracy and consistency of parliamentary documentation in the six official languages.