This Glossary (ECE/TRADE/377/Rev.2) represents an English-Russian-Chinese dictionary of terms that are widely used in trade facilitation. This is the third, revised and completed edition including new terms in trade facilitation and electronic business. For the first time it incorporates a Chinese version of the terms, thus expanding the previous English-Russian version. Also, for the first time it is prepared in both paper and electronic versions. The purpose of this Glossary is not to provide standard definitions for trade facilitation terms, but to help translators into Russian and Chinese; trainers building capacity on trade facilitation in countries and organizations that use Russian and Chinese; as well as practitioners from the public and private sectors, to establish a harmonized way of using trade facilitation terms in the three languages. We understand that this Glossary is a moving target and we rely on the user community to continue to provide comments and support for its further development.
This Glossary covers: (a) general terms, used in the literature and specialized discourses, such as trade facilitation, coordinated border management, data elements, supply chain, EDI, or national trade facilitation committees; (b) names of documents/forms that are used in international trade and transport, such as bill of lading, consignment note or phytosanitary certificate, as the simplification of these forms and the streamlining of the accompanying procedures of filling in, filing and endorsing these documents are the objectives of trade facilitation; (c) terms related to specific practices in trade, Customs, freight forwarding, transit and transportation procedures, such as advance ruling or inward processing; (d) terms used in WTO and other international legal instruments providing for trade facilitation measures. This Glossary covers terms related to Customs and other regulatory agency procedures, but also to non-tariff barriers to trade, B2G, G2G and B2B exchanges of information about goods traded across borders.