UN Resolution 242’s ambiguous wording on withdrawal hinged on a grammar-encoded article absence

Evidence

For the official translator, elegance is of no significance. What matters is accuracy. But even today, startling discrepancies may sometimes arise. Thus, for example, Article (i) of Security Council Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967 requires the ‘withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict’. The omission of the definite article before ‘territories’ has usually been taken to mean that the required withdrawal relates to some but not nec­ essarily all of the territories in question. This fine but crucial distinction is lost in both the French and Russian versions. The French text includes the definite article, since French grammar requires it. The Russian texts omits the definite article, since in Russian none exists. The Arabic translation, for both stylistic and political reasons, includes the article, but at that time Arabic was not an official UN language. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 200

Categorization

• XREF: Crystal-clear concrete instance of representation-producing mechanisms (how a text becomes legible differently across languages/politics) that parallels Said-adjacent claims about how translation shapes regional meaning.
• ADDENDUM: Supports and gives a precise legal-mechanical example to the general point about how diplomacy constructs the region through language.