Bilingual treaties with a shared master text spawned divergent national versions with serious discrepancies

Evidence

The treaty was drawn up in Italian, still at that time the main diplomatic language. The last article of the Treaty (Article XXVIII) says that the Treaty will be signed and sealed in two versions—one in Italian and Russian, the other in Italian and Turkish, so that each of the two signatory nations would have a version in their own language. The Italian version, which is the same for both, was obviously the binding one. Yet the Russians used the Russian version and the Turks used the Turkish version, and quite considerable discrepancies appear between the two, both nominally based on the same Italian text. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 197

Categorization

• SEED: The Kuchuk Kaynarja case is a vivid example for an essay on how the ‘neutral’ master language of translation never stays neutral — each nation re-read itself into the jointly signed text.
• XREF: connects to: Classical translations routinely distort meaning through culturally specific terms — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1600; A court held lack of translation defeated meaningful participation — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 82; Shared recitation’s meaning does not survive passage into mature citizenship — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 361 (+2 more)