A reader prompted by my Nagorno-Karabakh posting writes:

I was interested in the part of this post where you refer to the negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan and in particular the Russian negotiator’s cabinet of diplomatic curiosities and arguments over the placing of commas and use of the word ‘the’. (Reminiscent of ‘It depends what you mean by “is” ‘, of recent notoriety!)

… You no doubt know of the case of the Agreement between France/UK/Russia in respect of the ‘67 war. The necessity of a definite article in French the absence of one in Russian, and of it being an option in English was highlighted by Bernard Lewis. Did the British deliberately and cunningly omit the definite article in the English version?  Further, your comment about ‘commas’ reminds me of the 1945 treaty on Human Rights, where by swapping a comma for a semi-colon Russia was let off the hook for a whole raft of transgressions…

A vast area, going (if one has the stamina) into all sorts of Deep Theory about meaning and language and differences between interpreting/translation.  For now, a quick thought or two.

Sometimes simple mistakes in heat-of-the-moment translating take on a life of their own – remember those feckless Poles?

But what about this? How to explain the official Russian interpreters not translating President Putin’s vivid observations as he uttered them on what might happen to Muslim male genitalia in Moscow?

Either they were instructed in general when interpreting for him to use their judgement and row back on anything which might sound too ‘aggressive’ for non-Russian audiences. Or they had been told in advance that he might say this one thing, and that they should not translate it. One way or the other, remarkable.

Anyone wanting some lively examples of more deliberate ambiguity in diplomatic documents need look no further than the Diplo website.

Here is a neat summary of why ambiguous wording might be chosen deliberately to help keep a process on track.

Followed by some elegant examples, ranging from ancient Greece to Dayton via Yalta and UNSCR 242:

The ambiguous provision is the following: “establishment of just and lasting peace in the Middle East should include the application of both the following principles:


– withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in recent conflict…”

… This resolution uses the English construction “territories occupied in recent conflict”, from which the definite article “the” has been omitted. That is why it was possible to raise the question as to whether Israel was actually asked to withdraw from all the territories occupied in the recent conflict, or to withdraw from some, but not all, territories.

Ambiguity can take the form of words which carry different meanings, depending how the text is read. Or it can be seemingly contradictory thoughts in different parts of a supposedly coherent document.

Here is what I wrote in 1999 about the Bosnia and Herzegovina Constitution as agreed at Dayton in late 1995:

 It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that certain provisions of the new Constitution accepted by the Balkan nationalists at Dayton introduced a new apartheid-like discrimination in Europe.

Article V laid down that “The Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina shall consist of … one Bosniac and one Croat, each directly elected from the territory of the Federation, and one Serb directly elected from the territory of the Republika Srpska”. 

This bizarre provision meant that, for example, no Bosniac returning to live in Republika Srpska could run for the highest office in his/her own country, and that Jews or people of mixed ethnicity choosing to call themselves Bosnians were barred from candidacy wherever they lived. It also arguably ran counter to the European Convention on Human Rights which elsewhere was incorporated directly into the BH Constitution and given “priority over all other law”.  

 Is the Bosnia and Herzegovina Constitution unconstitutional?

Good question. Still unhappily unanswered.

Punctuation matters too. When I was in Sarajevo I was asked not to use the short-hand phrase ‘Bosnia-Herzegovina’ in my telegrams – that apparently conveyed something incorrect (and divisive), so only ‘Bosnia and Herzegovina’ should be used.

All of which summons to mind a famous UK law report where the judgement turned on the meaning of the word ‘with’.

A man X entered a cubicle of a public lavatory and started to commit an ‘indecent act’. During the commission thereof, he became aware of another man Y attentively watching him through a hole in the partition wall. He pressed on (so to speak), undaunted.

Police swoop!

X and Y are charged with committing an act of gross indecency ‘with’ each other. Their defence (unsuccessful, if I recall correctly) was that they were strangers and that they had not been ‘with’ each other in any sense that mattered.

If humans can not say or do anything unambiguously in diplomacy or in public lavatories, no surprise that computers struggle too?