Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal

Imprisonment for International Crimes : An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the ICTY Sentence Enforcement Practice

“…341 During the Nazi regime, the propaganda labelled Jews as a bacillus that needs to be exterminated, 342 while in Rwanda, the radical Hutu elite at the center of the government mobilized their genocidal movement by publicly labelling Tutsi and the Hutu opposition as "inyenzi" (cockroaches). 343 Another example of a dehumanizing element in ideologies can pertain to the systemic persecution of Bosnian Muslims during the post-Yugoslavian wars, which also involved their labelling as "balije" (backward or simpleton Muslim peasants 344 ), a highly derogatory term for Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ideologies that serve to define certain groups as having less worth or value than others are dangerous in the sense that they create a greater social distance between the perpetrators and the target group, making the latter more vulnerable to victimization.…”

Aspects of Language and the Law: Exploring Further Avenues

“…The issues regarding the allimportant domains of legal translation and interpreting soon became leading lines of academic enquiry both in translation studies and ELP as, for example, such seminal works as those by Cao (2007) in translation, Hale (2004) or Mikkelson (2014) in interpreting, and, more recently, interpretation at war crimes trials (Elias-Bursać, 2015). Language and law has now come to be a multi-facetted and protean area of study and publications devoted to the subject need, necessarily, to reflect this diversity and evolution, as illustrated for instance, by Freeman and Smith's Law and Language (2013) which offers a wide range of papers dealing with legal philosophy, law and literature, semantics or translations.…”

Linguistic justice

“…Over time the language units worked out a compromise in this regard. 796 Before moving to the legal merits of the above statement, it must be remarked that forbidding footnoting is normally expressed as "There shall be no footnoting in translations," whereas embellishing, omitting, or editing from translation and interpreting is an entirely different matter. The compromise "the language unit" worked out was to mark '/as printed/' or '/as written/' where a source text was ambiguous, unclear, or erroneous in a way that must be noted in the translation; to avoid using '/sic/' for this same purpose because '/sic/' was perceived as mildly derisive in tone; simple errors in a source text were corrected with no special notation, i.e., if a place name, such as 'Sarajevo', was spelled incorrectly, this error would be corrected and the correction would not be marked as such; in errors of substance when the translator knew with certainty what the correction should be, s/he would present the word in slashes in the translation; if relatively, but not 100%, certain that a correction was warranted, the translator annotated the correction as '/?.../', suggesting that this is a well-founded guess but not a certainty; an illegible word or passage was annotated as precisely as possible, as '/illegible word/', '/three illegible words/', '/illegible paragraph/', etc.…”

“…Elias-Bursać reports on two serious interpreting incidents that she noticed at the ICTY calling that "an impressive record" for 10,000 trial days. 859 One of these "impressive record[s]" for 10,000 trial days is an instance where a court interpreter translating into English, during the court session, on hearing what the client had to say completed her interpreting and then exclaimed into the microphone in a language the client can understand "Jao, što sere!" (Is he bullshitting or what!).…”