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CIAO DATE: 2/99
International Negotiation: A Semantic Analysis *
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
International Studies Association
40th Annual Convention
Washington, D.C.
February 16–20, 1999
Introduction
My argument is as follows: The English-language discourse that dominates both the international practice of negotiation and the discussion of the subject at the present time is simply one semantic rendering among many. It is in fact a highly individual, and even idiosyncratic version of a universal activity that takes numerous local forms. The English-language model is made up of a number of interconnected and coherent sets of meaning and usage underpinned by the ethical motifs of equity and good faith. Such semantic domains reflect the focal assumptions and preoccupations of the society served by the language. In the Anglo-American tradition relevant domains include the Common Law, business, sport, and the adversarial approach to advocacy. These domains can be disaggregated in turn into the component semantic fields of key negotiating words such as “concession”, “compromise”, “trust”, and so on. 2 Alongside the English version there exist other characteristic, self-consistent, and quite different discourses of negotiation that are not just foreign-language restatements of a prior, privileged English paradigm but valid and distinctive versions in their own right imbued with special meanings and values. Were the Japanese, rather than the English discourse of negotiation to be preeminent, we would talk about negotiation in a quite different way, not the same way using unfamiliar words.
Elements of these separate negotiating discourses certainly correspond, possibly reflecting the heritage of a common archetypal “great tradition” of negotiation going back in a continuous genealogy to at least the third millennium BCE. 3 (In my work on diplomacy in the ancient Near East I was able to identify aspects of negotiation that strikingly resemble contemporary practice, particularly in the area of trade. 4 The haggling over prices and quantities revealed in the diplomatic correspondence of the Great Kings of the Amarna age of about 1350 BCE was not very different from that still conducted in markets the world over.) Possession of a common paradigm, or set of assumptions about basic concepts such as money, the market, and bidding enables traders to buy and sell on an international basis, irrespective of their indigenous cultural heritage and language. Demonstrably, throughout the ages, from Ugarit to Dar Es Salaam, seafaring traders with very limited shared vocabularies have had little difficulty in doing business with each other.
When more complex and emotive subjects than goods and prices are negotiated across cultures, however, interlocutors cannot rely on everyone possessing consonant assumptions about negotiation—procedural, substantive, or normative. Negotiation for the resolution of international conflict is a good case in point, since different cultures have evolved strikingly different ethics of and approaches to the problem. In opposition to the Western view, conflict may be seen as part of the natural order of things or, in inter-communal strife, as socially functional. Where one culture assigns priority to tackling head-on the underlying “causes of conflict”, another may attach a higher value to the restoration of social harmony and opt for indirect and temporary palliatives. One may have evolved elaborate tools to suppress communal violence, another may institutionalize it in the form of the blood feud. Serious problems arise when actors attempt to resolve conflict across these separate paradigms. Meanwhile, distinctive ontologies of conflict and its resolution are faithfully reflected in mother tongue discourses.
In ethically charged areas of international life touching on issues such as conflict resolution, human rights, religion, ethnic identity, security, and so on, English by itself proves an inadequate and biased guide. Thick knowledge of the local language and culture of one’s interlocutors is essential if one is to make sense of their needs and concerns. Only unmediated access to the knowledge encapsulated in native discourse can enable negotiators and analysts to identify the congruencies and dissonances between their own assumptions and those of others. If negotiation is an attempt to create shared meanings and understandings where contradictory readings existed before, then there really is no alternative to the attempt to break out of the habits of thought conditioned by the English language. In the remarks that follow I shall seek to demonstrate that English discourse is culture-bound and that an exclusive reliance on knowledge of English in international negotiations can only mislead. I propose to go about this by means of a comparative analysis of some of the semantics of negotiation in English and Hebrew.
A semantic approach to negotiation
Much international negotiation today is conducted by representatives—of states, companies, or organizations—speaking different mother tongues. To bridge the language gap they either make use of the services of interpreters or, increasingly, in their direct contacts and communications, resort to a common third language, an interlanguage. This is usually, though not always, English, self-evidently the language of a dominant and assertive power and civilization. Widespread use of the English language in negotiation gives rise to the notion among native English-speakers that their language is free of any idiosyncratic bias, able to depict the negotiating process with absolute verisimilitude in a value-free manner. It is then easy to infer that use of English as an interlanguage by non-native speakers levels the linguistic playing field, enabling negotiation to be conducted without fear of distortion in terms of constant, agreed categories and concepts.
That assertion can only be maintained within the closed confines of discussions between unilingual English speakers drawing on exclusively English language materials. It is refuted the moment other discourses are taken seriously. In an ongoing project I am mapping out and comparing the semantic domains of negotiation of English and major Middle Eastern languages (Egyptian Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and Turkish). Middle Eastern languages were chosen to get away from the “Standard Average European” (SAE) languages (English, French, Dutch, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and so on) that share a more or less common discourse of negotiation, and whose ontological assumptions and categories have long dominated the scene. 5 Detailed comparative lexical analysis at native speaker level demonstrates the asymmetries and asynchronies of the semantic fields of key negotiating terms and aggregate domains across English and Middle Eastern languages. Overall, very different normative, metaphorical, and practical discourses of negotiation present themselves.
The method adopted here is essentially derived from semantics. This has been defined as “The study of meaning as between linguistic expressions and what the expressions describe; the study of the relations between sentences and the thoughts they express.” 6 The premise underlying this approach is that semantic analysis of the language of negotiation is a more faithful guide to negotiating culture than observed behavior. In actual situations negotiating moves are contingent, hence indeterminate, and anyway open to various interpretations. Language is the indisputably shared body of sense and significance of the community. For this very reason it is acknowledged that while analysis of words can shed light on negotiating discourse, it can only go so far in elucidating the substantive issues dealt with. The attempt to reconstruct and interpret a given society’s language of negotiation is intended to provide an insight into that language community’s common understanding of what negotiation signifies, implies, entails, and requires. Grasp of the semantics is the key to deciphering what native speakers mean by certain descriptions, characterizations, or prescriptions of negotiating behavior in their own language. Obviously, it cannot deal with the modalities and conditional uncertainties of actual behavior in a contingent and reflexive, hence indeterminate situation. Benjamin Whorf argues that “people act about situations in ways which are like the ways they talk about them.” 7 But this assumes “all things being equal”, namely, that behavior can be isolated from circumstances and the actions and responses of others.
Explicating the word “compromise” will not enable you to predict whether and how much a native speaker of English will concede in a given situation but it will inform you what is meant by the concept designated. When the American or British governments consider a “compromise proposal” at a critical stage of a negotiation clearly lexical analysis will provide no information on the details of the impending offer, which is not forthcoming in a vacuum. What the philologist can be confident of is that a “compromise proposal” is unlikely to be intended from the outset to be unacceptable, to up the ante, or to go no way at all towards meeting the opponent’s aspirations. Such a misapplication of the word would normally be considered to be a breach of the rules of the language game governing the use of the word “compromise” in English. One can therefore be fairly sure that what is being put forward is an offer roughly equidistant between the previous positions of the negotiating parties, intended to meet fairly their vital needs.
While the tasks of both dictionary definition and straightforward translation presuppose the semantic equivalence of foreign and English terms, in many cases the English synonym is only a rough approximation of the original, especially when we are dealing with different language families, SAE as opposed to Semitic, for example. Non-English terms may possess a broader or narrower range of meanings compared to their English equivalents. The resonances of the words—their connotations and nuances—may be very different. Since most words are polysemic, that is, have a number of different meanings, foreign and English words may have overlapping semantic fields but rarely coincide across the entire span of significance. Occasionally, a really adequate English translation of a difficulty foreign language term may require a more elaborate and lengthy explanation and exegesis than is practical given constraints of time and space.
Philological analysis, it should be immediately made clear, is enlightening and useful only if it is conducted with consciousness of its limitations and pitfalls. It seeks to decipher the meanings of words and texts, scraping away the surface varnish to reveal underlying trends and patterns. Sometimes, though, words become worn or are used unreflectively, losing their special connotations. In particular, the analysis of past or literary meanings should only be understood as a guide to present associations, not a definitive prescription, since older associations continually give way to modern resonances. Note, however, that individuals involved in international negotiation can be expected to possess above average education and language skills and so be aware of literary meanings. Moreover, speakers of very old tongues remain sensitive throughout life to the exceptionally rich linguistic reverberances of ancient but still vital and cherished texts such as the Bible, the Upanishads, or the Koran.
The impetus to this project was provided by George Steiner’s book After Babel 8 , in which he shows the intractable problems posed by literary translation. As someone who is multilingual, brought up speaking English, French, and German with equal competence, Steiner is particularly sensitive to the untranslatable nuances and resonances of each of his mother tongues. This biographical point is important, because unilingual speakers, lacking a comparative perspective, may be oblivious to the special features of their own language, let alone of others. Unusual semantic fields, odd terms and lacunae, unspoken cultural assumptions tend only to be revealed when the vocabularies of different languages are contrasted. A second language provides an external perspective, an Archimedean point, from which the otherness of the first language can be self-consciously discerned..
Linguistic diversity and the study of international negotiations
Linguistic diversity is one of the most striking features of the international scene. It is impossible to be precise about the number of languages in the world at the present time, but estimates are in the 4,000-6,000 range. Sadly, many of these are at risk. Major languages, those with 100m native speakers or more, include Chinese 1,000m, English 350m, Spanish 250m, Hindi 200m, Arabic 150m, Bengali 150m, Russian 150m, Portuguese 135m, Japanese 120m, German 100m. Counting official-language populations, the figures change with English estimated to have 1,400m users, Chinese 1,100m, Hindi 700m, Spanish 280m, Russian 270m, French 220m, Arabic 170m, Portuguese 160m, Malay 160m, Bengali 150m, Japanese 120m, German 100m. 9 In addition, there are numerous “minor” viable languages, some with just a few thousand speakers, their minority status in no way reflecting their inherent value or richness as repositories of ancient and unique views of the world.
Within most American universities foreign languages are studied from a variety of perspectives. Foreign languages are recommended to students who aim for international careers, area studies departments require knowledge of the relevant area languages, anthropologists and linguists compare and contrast languages. Yet within the international relations field on the whole the blatant fact of linguistic and therefore semantic diversity receives little attention and the dominance of English is presupposed. International negotiation is a prime case of neglect, since it is preeminently an activity which brings together individuals who speak different native languages and depict and evaluate reality in different ways. Negotiators are obliged to engage in a complex and subtle process of interaction, reframing stereotypical and preconceived notions, piecing together shared, intersubjective meaning out of contrasting versions of the truth. Even here, however, discussion of negotiation on the whole takes for granted that language and language differences are of peripheral importance, remaining silent on problems of comprehension and interpretation (as both translation and exegesis).
Several reasons can be ventured for this (largely unconscious) assumption. (I note without comment the Gramscian argument to the cultural hegemony of the preponderant power, preferring to discuss the matter from a philological not ideological perspective.) One reason is simply that most practitioners and observers of negotiation in the English-speaking world make use of translated texts or secondary sources, infrequently accessing primary foreign language sources. It is rare indeed that they have to puzzle over conundrums of meanings, ambiguities, subtle insinuations, or obscure religious references present in the original version. Even if semantic difficulties were originally present, they are removed in translation. 10 Indeed the job of the translator is precisely to excise disconcerting and obscure semantic peculiarities.
A second reason for overlooking linguistic diversity is the assumption that it does not matter because diplomatic negotiation across languages raises at the most technical problems, like those one encounters in the suk on holiday, that can be resolved by a competent interpreter. “Negotiation”, after all, in all its SAE cognates, has the underlying sense of doing business, handling a commercial transaction, an apparently universal activity. Nothing very complicated about that. Every day thousands of routine trade deals are negotiated across the globe according to a set of simple ground rules. English or some other lingua franca is used as the medium of communication. Often this medium is not even a full-blown language, simply a rudimentary pidgin, a linguistic amalgam with a very limited vocabulary, yet quite sufficient for the needs of trading. However, as noted, the analogy of intricate political negotiations with relatively uncomplicated commercial transactions is an unsatisfactory one. Technical interpretation, broken English, or a pidgin may be sufficient for commercial purposes, for transferring the lower range of signification across languages. They are highly problematic for conveying the upper range of semantic events, the expression of complex, often abstract ideas that reflect core values and assumptions of human behavior. Yet some of the most fraught international negotiations fall into this latter category. Arms control negotiations ostensibly concern types and quantities of armaments. At a more profound level they are about standing, security, justice, identity, and a nation’s sense of its place in history. Ask the Indians or Egyptians.
A further reason that linguistic diversity is overlooked is the assumption that English has acquired the status of the dominant world language and adequately serves the purposes and captures the definitive meanings of negotiators, even if their native languages are not English. Given the invariable excellence of diplomats’ English-language skills, this is an easy but spurious inference. The use of English, however fluent, does not detach non-native speakers from the heritage and influence of their own languages. ASEAN conducts its affairs in English, but its negotiating philosophy and ethos owes everything to regional paradigms. All too often the outward form of English conceals an idea conceived in the native tongue. People tend to translate out of their native language into a foreign target language while retaining the semantic nuances of the original. They are guilty of a kind of “literalist fallacy”, the trap one falls into when providing a literal dictionary-type translation of a term while ignoring its different connotative meanings across languages.
There is a misapprehension involved. (For the purposes of the argument I ignore the fact that English is still far from the only interlanguage and that French, German, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, and so on are used in different parts of the world.) The give-and-take of frontal negotiation is the tip of an iceberg. English may be used at the interface between the delegations. Under the surface, however, within the delegations, and between delegations and home, much if not everything is being conducted in the mother tongue. Negotiators receive their instructions, formulate their ideas, conduct their internal deliberations, and report back in their native language, not English. The substance of the negotiation is reported on in the domestic press and explained to the legislature and public opinion in the mother tongue. Politicians’ rhetoric is profoundly culture-bound. Unless they are perfectly bilingual, at every stage participants, direct and indirect, are likely to be more or less consciously interpreting from English into their own language. And “interpretation” in this sense entails exegesis as well as translation: the transfer of a message encoded in a source language, via a transformational process of identification, comprehension, matching, and selection, into the receptor language. This is not unmediated assimilation of the idea uttered at the negotiating table, but its conversion—translation—into the concepts and categories of the mother tongue.
Looked at in this way it can be seen that the ostensible dominance of English in international forums, bilateral and multilateral, at the United Nations, and throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, is in some ways an optical illusion. English is an undeniably vital medium of international communication but it has not replaced other languages across the sweep of political, cognitive, and bureaucratic activities within which face-to-face negotiation is lodged. What is reported in the diplomatic cables and in the English language press, and seen on television is only part of the linguistic and therefore semantic story.
The final reason for neglect of languages other than English is the powerful assumption that, as the contemporary language of science, of scholarly interaction and research, English constitutes a universal, objective metalanguage beyond culture, devoid of idiosyncrasy, perfectly able to capture deep, syntactical (not to say lexical) features of the natural and social universe. The claim to the ontological preeminence of English is unjustified. It is only because of a series of historical accidents that English, which in 1500 was about as important as Friesian (its closest relative), has become the world’s main interlanguage. There has always been the tendency to view the current interlanguage, whether Akkadian, Aramaic, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Italian or French as constituting a sort of privileged metalanguage able to mirror the “real world” with superior authenticity. But as Benjamin Whorf points out, a sense of linguistic perspective is in order, and there is no reason “to see a few recent dialects of the Indo-European family, and the rationalizing techniques elaborated from their patterns, as the apex of the evolution of the human mind, nor their present wide spread as due to any survival from fitness or to anything but a few events of history—events that could be called fortunate only from the parochial point of view of the favored parties.” 11 Any language, from Arabic to Hindi or Chinese, has the potential to become an interlanguage.
Problems of Translation
Edward Sapir, whom Benjamin Whorf followed, claimed that different languages map the world differently, each organizing it in its own way. “The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds not merely the same world with different labels attached.” 12 Sapir and Whorf went too far when they claimed that language imposes perception and determines thought. In Sapir’s view the forms of language “predetermine for us certain modes of observation and interpretation.” 13 This mechanistic formulation has rightly come under attack for ruling out imagination and innovation, and underestimating the human ability to invent or borrow words when some new concept becomes relevant. It may also overrate the role of language in thinking. Einstein broke out of existing linguistic categories to arrive at his theory of relativity. Language is not a pair of blinkers, otherwise, as George Steiner argues, we would not be able to communicate interlingually. 14 Experimental evidence, too, goes against the deterministic version of the thesis. 15
Nevertheless, a non-dogmatic variant of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, stressing influence and not determination, surely reflects what Steiner calls the “implicitness” and “at-homeness” of native speech, the experience of multilingual speakers, and the undoubted problems of literary translation. 16 In its weak version the hypothesis views “lower level grammatical and lexical categories” pointing speakers of different languages “towards somewhat different evaluations of externally similar observations”, and limiting them “to customary categories of thought.” 17 Provision in a language for expressing certain kinds of abstract relations can facilitate recognizing and thinking about them. 18 The weak version avoids the exaggerated claim, made by Whorf and refuted in effect by Chomsky, that languages reflect in some profound and inescapable way different syntactical geometries of space and time. But the weak version is sympathetic to Sapir’s lexical argument that “languages differ widely in the nature of their vocabularies. Distinctions which seem inevitable to us may be utterly ignored in languages which reflect an entirely different type of culture, while these in turn insist on distinctions which are all but unintelligible to us.” 19
This view is borne out by the comparative study of negotiating vocabularies. To dismiss linguistic particularity is to risk overlooking an entire dimension of the semantic dialectic, the debate over meaning, that runs through the negotiating exchange. If negotiation is about anything more than prices and quantities then it is likely to raise serious questions of interpretation, in the sense of elucidation of meaning. To establish this point it will be useful to consider the general problems of correspondence raised when a translator/interpreter seeks to reproduce in a target language the meaning encoded in a source language. 20 Although there are wider problems of translation than the lexical, the following remarks follow lexicon. Most of my examples below are taken from a comparison of English and Hebrew negotiating lexicons. 21
Different connotative principles
Every word in a language has potential associations besides its primary meaning in context. Some of these associations are highly personal to the individual speaker, deriving from one’s own experience and memories. Most connotations, though, are culturally conditioned attitudes or emotions shared by members of the speech community. In order to appreciate the range of resonances of Hebrew vocabulary, attention has to be drawn to an unusual etymological feature of Semitic languages, the fact that all words derive from a three-letter root. Any given word is visually, audibly, and semantically related to an entire family of other words with which it shares the same root. Related words evoke associations and recollections of each other. It is as though Hebrew lexicon were a piano keyboard, so that by playing a certain note the harmonics of others notes in the same key were set off in sympathetic resonance.
An example of this is the word emun, translated by the dictionary as “trust, confidence”, but with a semantic field that extends to cover meanings such as “loyalty, faith, faithfulness, fidelity, honesty, truth.” Emun is derived from the root A.M.N. and is connected to key biblical and religious terms such as amen (so be it! it is truly so!), emuna (belief in God), ma’amin (a believer), and ne’eman (a loyal follower). To swear fealty is to take an oath of emunim and a close confidant is a man of emunim. One of the words in Hebrew for treaty, amana (usually translated as “convention”) is derived from the same root. Significantly, so is the word for “credibility”, aminut. Thus emun conveys a powerful sense of absolute truth, belief, faithfulness, and purity of heart. From this we may conclude that interpersonal emun is founded on strict assumptions of truth-telling, sincerity, loyalty, and an almost religious-like conviction.
Clearly, emun and “trust” have overlapping meanings, but there are subtle differences. “Trust”, too, is a strong word implying integrity and reliability. In the United States trust in one’s negotiating partner is considered a precondition for a successful negotiation. It is felt that without confidence in each other’s word negotiating rivals are unlikely to take the risks necessary to reach agreement. Trust is one of a set of negotiating terms related to dependability that includes “good faith”, “keeping commitments”, “reputation”, and “credibility”. This semantic domain is connected to the central role of business in American life and the belief that flourishing commerce and investment rest on trust and confidence. Trust does have religious associations, as in the expression "In God we trust," found on American coins (indicating the link between capitalism and the Protestant ethic), and is also related to the truth ethic. But if emun originates in and directly evokes a stark Biblical faith, the loyalty of believers to a supreme cause, “trust” is embedded pragmatically in the semantic domain of financial confidence, the certainty of payment for goods given on credit. As an eminently practical requirement for doing business “trust” can be fostered between reasonable people of good will whatever their backgrounds, hence the sensible stress on confidence-building measures in negotiations. As a starkly irreducible ethical commitment emun sets very high—and sometimes unattainable—standards for ordinary mortals going about their daily affairs. And all this reflects a very characteristic understanding of negotiation as an activity imbued with moral purpose that is significantly different from the American conception of the activity.
Absence of a common referent
Problems may arise in translating a text from one language to another because of the absence of a common referent. In other words, the target language lacks a word because the community has no interest in the concept denoted by the original term. Missing the sentimental northern European attachment to the scenic as opposed to the strictly utilitarian dimension of cultivated land, Hebrew has no word for “countryside” and translates it by the equivalent of “outside the town” or “in the village”.
In the negotiating field there are a number of Hebrew terms that reflect unique features of Jewish culture. Just as important English negotiating terms are lodged in the semantic domain of commerce and investment, characteristic Hebrew terms are derived from the world of Talmudic scholarship and retain a sense of legal and semantic analysis, forensic persuasion, and lively debate. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the loss of national independence, Rabbinical Judaism substituted ritual study for the Temple service, theory becoming a surrogate for practice. Words linked with conflict that tend to have negative connotations in other Middle Eastern languages such as “argument” (vikuach), “discussion” (diyun), and “dispute” (machloket) preserve positive connotations in Hebrew of Jewish legal-ethical-ritual-theological debate “for the sake of heaven”.
Terms that originally labeled and continue to evoke singular features of Talmudic study are hard to render satisfactorily in English without conveying tendentiously derogatory allusions. (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives one of the definitions of “legalism” as “Adherence to the Mosaic law as opposed to the Gospel”. 22 “Legalistic” in some contexts is equated with “Talmudic”, though close attention to fine points of terminology is hardly alien to Common Law.) In former prime minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin’s Hebrew-language memoirs the tough August 1975 negotiations with Egypt through the good offices of the United States are described as follows: “Myriads of words wandered in the void. We split hairs for long hours over every half a clause.” 23 “Split hairs” is my approximate and highly unsatisfactory translation of hitpalpalnu, a term that does not mean to those who engage in it irrelevant nit-picking, but the reverent absorption in and subtle discussion of Talmudic texts. The method entails drawing out meanings and implications by applying recognized logical principles of deduction, interpretation, and philology. It does involve the “parsing” of words to some extent but such close reading is no more “legalistic quibbling” than the close textual study of literature is “literary quibbling”.
However the term might best be rendered into English, the problematic passage is edited out of the American edition and so the English-speaking reader is deprived of having to ponder an unusual and yet indicative features of Hebrew negotiating discourse. 24 Anyone reading the Rabin Memoirs (English) as opposed to Service Diary (Hebrew) would find it hard to discern the authentic voice of the Hebrew-speaking Jewish leader behind the bland, standardized facade of the English-language version. Nor would they find any traces remaining of the characteristic Hebrew discourse of negotiation. If the English game of cricket was described with the vocabulary of baseball by a radio commentator, would an American listener be able to detect that another game was in fact being played?
One language draws shades of meaning absent in the other
As Edward Sapir suggests, different languages do not necessarily draw the boundaries between ideas and phenomena in the same places, sometimes finding it important to classify phenomena on very different lines. Hebrew is not preoccupied with hierarchy and social class as is British English but it does see fit to discriminate finely between numerous categories of ritually proper and improper food and drink, and sacred and profane items.
In the negotiating field Hebrew completely fails to distinguish between various points on the spectrum of determined negotiating behavior. It has one single term for “emphatically maintaining a point of view”, lehitakesh, usually translated as “insist”. However, while “insist” is located at the moderate end of the spectrum, the semantic field covered by lehitakesh extends broadly and indiscriminately from reasonable determination, via stubborn persistence and unyielding insistence, to obdurate behavior. Two related words from the same root are nukshut, “intransigence,” and akshan, “stubborn” or “a stubborn person”. In English “insistence” can be flexibly qualified by different adjectives registering various degrees of emphasis or replaced by a variety of near-synonyms such as “tenacity”, “resolution”, “determination”, and so on, conveying subtly different shades of meaning. The Hebrew term allows for no such fine tuning; one word covers all. Only context and perhaps hindsight permit one to decide whether the conduct characterized is one of principled resolution, tactical firmness leaving room for future flexibility, or utter intransigence.
A word in one language covers concepts another language keeps separate
Since many of even the ostensibly simplest words are polysemic, that is, have multiple meanings, it is common to find that a word and its equivalent in another language cover overlapping but not coincident semantic fields. Problems of translation can arise in this case for two reasons. First, a word may have been deliberately chosen in order to convey more than one of its separate meanings. This is common in poetry and humor and is why word play and double-entendre are next to impossible to convey across languages. However, in this case unwitting confusion is unlikely because it is well understood that the ideas denoted are actually conceptually distinct. More complicated are cases where words combine categories of experience or conduct that are then unconsciously felt by native speakers to naturally go together. An obvious consequence of this state of affairs is that different expectations of appropriate behavior for named activities are then generated across the semantic gap.
A good example of this important phenomenon is vitur, the usual Hebrew translation of “concession”. With the general sense of giving something up, whether a right, position, colleague, or point of view, vitur covers a broad range of situations characterized by various different words in English, including concession in a negotiation, surrender of an ambition, giving up someone’s services, abdication of the throne, waiver of an entitlement, giving in in a contest. Clearly, the semantic field of vitur overlaps with “concession” but by no means coincides with it. The Hebrew word possesses painful implications of relinquishment and renunciation not suggested by the English term with its equitable and fair-minded timbre. Expressions in English gracefully redolent of fair play such as “I concede the point”, or “I concede to your greater wisdom”, would have to be translated into Hebrew by a term other than vitur.
Given the sacrificial flavor of vitur there is an implication that in proceeding along the path of concessions one is walking a fine line between pragmatism and weakness. If one is not careful there is the risk of crossing from matching concessions to unilateral surrender. This is further suggested in Hebrew by the connection between the closely related words vitur and vatranut. Derived from the same root as vitur (V.T.R.), vatranut conveys the sense, not of reasonable and judicious mutual concessions towards a compromise agreement in the interests of the two sides, but of “leniency, indulgence, giving way”. 25 Vatranut is sometimes used in Hebrew as the equivalent of “appeasement”, trying to buy off an insatiable aggressor with one-sided concessions out of weakness and poor judgment. A vatran, one who commits chronic vatranut, is someone unable to stand up for herself. It should come as no surprise then that in the Israeli negotiating literature vitur often goes hand in hand with the epithet “painful sacrifice”.
A word and its foreign language equivalent may have different value connotations
In terms of strict logic an “ought” cannot be derived from an “is”. In other words, from an observation of what is one cannot draw a conclusion about what should be without assuming an added normative premise. From “I see a man drowning” one can only infer “I must attempt to save him” if one assumes the premise “we have an obligation to save the lives of people in danger”. However, since language is not a system of symbolic logic but is embedded in the life of the community, and moreover reflects and conveys the culturally-influential meaning of canonical texts, it neither is nor could be value-free. In many cases seemingly factual statements or neutral words are actually imbued with ethical connotations because the normative premise though unstated is implicit. This is particularly the case with Hebrew and Arabic, languages of ancient religions and sacred texts, where even the terms for inanimate objects and ordinary activities may be shot through with moral significance.
Given the Biblical origins of some key Hebrew negotiating terms it may be hard to use them without introducing, intentionally or not, emphatic value judgments absent or muted in the original English-language version. An example of this is the word “obstacle”, something that “stands in the way and hinders progress”. 26 There is no doubt that “obstacle” does have negative connotations in English given the presumption that progress is a good thing and anything that gets in its way is to be deplored. It does not, however, carry the unusual moral weight of its Hebrew equivalent, mikhshol.
Like “obstacle”, mikhshol is something blocking a route and by extension progress in an endeavor. But here its family connections come into the picture. Mikhshol is derived from the same root (K.Sh.L.) as the Hebrew word for “failure”, kishalon or “mistake”, keshel. Most important, is its link with lehakhshil, meaning “to hinder” or, literally, maliciously “cause to fail” and makhshayla, an “impediment”, something placed in a person’s way on purpose. From this follows the main difference between “obstacle” and mikshol. In English the word “obstacle”, depicts a completely neutral object, free of any moral associations, like a pile of stones or a fallen tree. Mikhshol, however, because of its connection to words signifying purposive, malevolent action, may well possess a sense of something deliberately caused and therefore morally reprehensible. This emerges clearly in the biblical verse, well known to Israelis as ordaining an imperative of Jewish ethics, “You shall not insult the deaf or place a stumbling block (mikhshol) before the blind”. 27
A speech by Likud defense minister Moshe Arens in which he angrily attacked US policy towards Israeli settlement activity, using mikhshol like a mantra, captures the word’s ethically charged significance in Hebrew: “But the administration in Washington refuses to concede to Israel and insists that those settlements [on the West Bank] constitute a mikhshol to peace. When Jews return to Hebron, the burial-place of our Fathers, the first capital of King David, the city whose Jewish Quarter was destroyed in the dreadful pogrom of 1929—is that a mikhshol to peace? Is the resettlement of the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, destroyed by the Jordan Legion in 1948, a mikhshol to peace? When the children of the founders of the kibbutzim in the Etzion Bloc return to the land that their fathers plowed and sowed—until the Jordanian army captured this land after a long siege—is this a mikhshol to peace?. When Israel strengthens its presence in Judea and Samaria, an area vital to our security, is that a mikhshol to peace? No. When Moslem fanatics throughout the world say that the divine will is for Israel to be destroyed—that’s a mikhshol to peace!” 28
From key words to negotiating domains
Comparative lexicology must go beyond more than the disconnected identification and clarification of individual semantic discrepancies, however. Particular points of dissonance are simply instances of a wider underlying divergence about the meaning and valency of negotiation across languages. As noted, words can be shown to cluster into culturally distinctive themes, which in turn interweave into overall semantic domains. Thematic clusters may reflect central civilizational metaphors, social institutions, or systems of belief. Identifying such themes and domains is the key to understanding how a given society conceives and frames negotiation. In American English indicative terms like “straight dealing”, “trust”, “deliver the goods”, “good faith”, “credibility”, “level playing field”, “fairness”, “confidence-building measures”, “keeping your word”, “just solution”, and so on map out an ethic of rule-governed, fair competition. After all, just competition is the invisible hand guiding society in the efficient allocation of value. Major thematic domains include game playing and sport, doing business, the adversarial approach to debate, and the due process of law. Overall, they establish a discourse of negotiation as a pragmatic, equitable process of give and take in which all sides benefit, and in which the resourceful solution of problems arising is considered a paramount virtue. “Negotiation”, indeed, not only means working towards an agreement and transacting a financial instrument (such as cashing a check), but also clearing a series of obstacles. To declare a matter “negotiable” explicitly announces a willingness to cooperate to overcome difficulties—specifically, to make concessions in order to arrive at a reasonable compromise.
None of the Modern Hebrew equivalents of “negotiation” cover the semantic fields of either conducting a financial transaction or clearing impediments, though the idea of trading is certainly present. Major semantic domains include the Bible and Judaism, Jewish Law, Zionism, war, and commerce. Many key terms echo ideological and religious motifs, suffusing political negotiation with a tone of high moralistic drama and righteous purpose. It is hard to use Hebrew without tapping into a world of Biblical and Jewish resonances—religious, legal, and historical. Zionism, with its evocative message for Jews of return, and national and personal redemption, reinforces this potent tendency. The frequent experience of war and the prominence of retired generals in government inserts a further motif of combat and power into negotiating discourse. Overall, negotiation in Hebrew (generically, masa umatan), bifurcates into two distinct categories, commercial and religious-legal. Normal commercial negotiating (mekach umimkar) reflecting the universal theme of the market, is roughly analogous to “bargaining”. But the characteristic pattern of Israeli political negotiating is grounded in a different model, the study among scholars of the voluminous works of Jewish religious law, debate, and commentary, the Mishna and Talmud. The dialectic mode of thought and argument fostered by this occupation (shakla vetarya—back and forth, query and response), considered by practicing Jews their paramount spiritual duty, has decisively influenced Jewish intellectual life since the time of the Second Temple. The elucidation of texts through reasoned debate is the archetypal approach to dealing with matters touching on the identity, destiny, welfare and safety of the nation in a hostile gentile world. These are among the themes dealt with by Jewish religious texts. Within this model negotiation is configured as a rigorous dialogue about the meaning of texts between partners in scholarship, a sort of hallowed intellectual duel. Problems are never definitively resolved because solution would impose closure, an inconceivable prospect when discussion is an end in itself, not a means to an end. For negotiating high political, national, or diplomatic matters Israeli leaders tend to dislike the discourse of commercial negotiating and resist using bargaining words like mekach umimkar to label what they are doing. The terminology of vigorous textual dispute is readily adopted.
An application: “territories for peace”
Native language reading of key negotiating terms configures the understanding of instructions, the formulation of negotiating positions, the content of arguments, drafting choices, post-agreement rhetoric, and implementation. There is certainly evidence in the international law literature to demonstrate that inconsistent understandings of the meaning of individual terms and hence contractual commitments can arise from translation difficulties. 29 However, much more detailed research is needed to refine our understanding of the effects of broad paradigmatic differences in negotiating discourse on the entire process, inclusively defined to comprehend the critical prenegotiation, policy making, consultation, legitimation, ratification, and implementation stages, as well as the classic core activities of frontal negotiating and drafting. It is also necessary to go beyond the comparison of single terms to the analysis of the impact of discrepant readings of critical texts taken as a whole.
Given the confines of space here the methodology and gist of this kind of exercise can be rehearsed by comparing the English and Hebrew meanings of a brief but influential negotiating phrase: the “territories for peace” 30 formula for achieving a settlement in the Middle East so often referred to by commentators, diplomats, and academic experts. This form of words is considered important as setting broad conceptual guidelines that are roughly acceptable to all the parties for the conduct of negotiations between Israel and the Arabs (in which Americans and Europeans also play a mediating role of greater or lesser importance). This formula is misleadingly simple and straightforward because it means something quite different to Israelis thinking in Hebrew than to English-speakers thinking in English (and, indeed, to Arabic-speakers thinking in Arabic).
Let us first take the term “territories”. In English “territory” indicates a tract of land with undefined boundaries. It has connotations of a rather extensive area—hence the Northern Territory of Australia, for example. In the plural, “territories”, it suggests land of vast unbounded dimensions, as in “the territories west of the Mississippi”. This sense of immensity is totally absent from the equivalent Hebrew term shtakhim, plural of shetakh. Shetakh is found in such expressions as the Hebrew equivalent of “built-up area”, “prohibited area”, “firing range”, and “no-man’s land”. In fact, shtakhim best translates “areas” not “territories” at all because an expression adequately conveying the dimensions of the English word is simply lacking in Hebrew. This is hardly surprising if one considers the relative spatial proportions of Israel (Biblical and modern) and the English-speaking world: The United Kingdom extends over 94,241 square miles, the United States 3,787,425 square miles, Israel 8,019 square miles. Given the straitened geographical context within which the Hebrew vocabulary emerged and is spoken a term for “territories” as such has no clear local reference. To the Israeli, in other words, shtakhim connotes a region of strictly limited, not unbounded dimensions.
Take next the loaded word “peace”. In English “peace” means a state of non-war, the absence of hostilities and disorder, and the existence of harmony and tranquillity. There is also the sense of “stillness” as in the term “peace and quiet”. “Peace” as “greetings” is somewhat archaic. “Peace” has strong international political connotations for the English speaker because of the word’s long usage in the framework of diplomatic peacemaking, such as the Peace of Westphalia, the Peace of Versailles, and so on. It also has powerful religious connotations because of its association with the Gospels and the message of Jesus, the “Prince of Peace”. In the Christian tradition that suffuses this dimension of the word, the pursuit of peace is considered a supreme ethical imperative: “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God” 31 ; “and on earth peace, good will toward men” 32 .
In Hebrew shalom covers a wider semantic field, a different connotative meaning, and is used much more frequently than “peace”. It is mentioned 237 times in the Bible and many of the pertinent Biblical verses have become an integral part of the Hebrew language, being cited in many daily prayers and common phrases. Interestingly, it is mostly used in the context of domestic rather than international order, though it means that, too: “Pray for the well-being (shalom) of Jerusalem; May those who love you be at peace (shalva). May there be well-being (shalom) within your ramparts, peace (shalva) in your citadels”. 33 Shalom is a very common word in spoken Hebrew, and as a greeting it opens and concludes most conversations. When children make up after a quarrel, they declare sholem, using the Yiddish pronunciation of shalom. Thus if “peace” has the “absence of war” and “freedom from strife” as its primary meanings, shalom has “greetings”, followed by “well-being” as its primary meanings.
In third place shalom means harmony and fraternal cooperation between nations, not just an absence of hostilities. The paradigm is the brotherly friendship between King Solomon and Hiram, king of Tyre or, as people say in modern Israel, “shalom, just like between Belgium and Holland”. Moreover, given the long hiatus in Jewish statehood from 135–1948, the word has acquired high-minded, prophetic resonances rather than the operative, diplomatic significance it possesses for the heirs of the European state system. Finally, in addition to the “tranquillity” and “quietness” found in “peace”, shalom has an important additional meaning absent from the semantic field of the English term, namely, the idea of “safety”. Incongruously for the English speaker, Hebrew news bulletins following a military operation often contain the phrase “all our planes/forces returned in shalom to base” (meaning “safely”, not “peacefully”). Clearly this meaning stands in marked contrast to the SAE sense of “peace” as the absence of all violence.
The last element of “territories for peace” worth considering is in some ways the least conspicuous but most consequential of all. Usually, one would not even give a thought to the use of the preposition “for”. In the aforementioned formula it is the key word establishing the terms of exchange. “For” is a polysemic word with a remarkably broad set of uses. It clearly partly means here “in exchange for” as in “3 for 99 cents.” In the context of “for peace”, though, given the momentous ethical connotations of “peace”, it also has the sense of “for the sake of”. The Hebrew term tmurat has none of this sense of relinquishment in a higher cause whatsoever; there is another quite different word for that, l’ma’an. Tmurat means simply “in return for” or “in exchange for”.
It can be seen right away that “territories for peace” conveys in English the notion of “relinquishing large tracts of real estate for the sake of peace on earth”. The implication is that this is a eminently justifiable sacrifice in the service of a sublime cause. On the one side of the equation there is territory, a commodity by implication in plentiful supply. On the other, peace, one of the most elevated and cherished ideals in the Christian tradition. The Hebrew version, shtakhim tmurat shalom can be paraphrased as “exchanging a small area of land in return for safety, well being, and friendship”. On the one side of this equation is a scarce and precious asset, which in the Zionist ideal is a source of national redemption (and which religious Jews believe was promised by God to Abraham). In strict exchange is expected and demanded first and foremost the safety of the populace, implying security from terrorism and aggression, an end to historical vulnerability. If the English version suggests conceding something less valuable for the sake of a supreme good, to Israelis the Hebrew version suggests sacrificing something of very great value for a tangible increment in the security of the nation. Given the fact that withdrawal in Israel’s precarious geopolitical circumstances makes the country more vulnerable in some respects, this proposition is demonstrably by no means uncontested.
A similar analysis of the Arabic version of the “territories for peace” formula could be easily undertaken, but the principle should by now be clear. A form of words that is generally supposed to define the consensual terms of exchange for a settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute turns out on closer examination to mean very different things in Hebrew and in English. In the case of the 1979 peace between Egypt and Israel the formula worked, since in return for the Sinai desert, indeed a vast desert waste—that had never been part of the Promised Land—Israel received a markedly improved security situation on the ground, acquiring peace and safety. On other fronts, the Golan and West Bank, the formula is problematic. The land at issue is limited in area, of high value for defense against surprise attack, and is viewed by many as part of the historical heritage of Israel. The peace offered in return is less than what Israelis understand to be implied by the term: Syria offered diplomatic relations narrowly defined; after the 1993 Oslo accords the Palestinian Authority was unable to deliver safety. Far from permitting the coordination of expectations and the synchronization of action the “territories for peace” formula has sent the parties off on divergent trajectories.
If Israelis have read the formula according to the meaning of the Hebrew and not the English then it is safe to assume that problems of cross-linguistic interpretation are no less salient for the speakers of other non-SAE languages. In Israel, English is the most widely-used foreign language, American culture is everywhere, and government and the private sector conduct their overseas business in English with reasonable fluency. But it is hard to escape the pervasive influence of the mother tongue. Most non-native speakers of English unconsciously accommodate English within a semantic framework provided by the language of their hearth and home. At the same time they conduct negotiations not along the lines configured by Anglo-American discourse but in conformity with the internal logic of their own indigenous negotiating paradigm. Failure to assign sufficient weight to differences in negotiating discourse therefore conceals from unsuspecting observers an entire dimension of potential dissonance in communication and negotiation between peoples.
Endnotes
*: Paper presented to the annual convention of the International Studies Association Washington, DC, February 16–20, 1999 Back.
Note 1: The author is grateful for funding provided by the United States Institute of Peace for the project and for the kind encouragement of the Institute’s Richard Solomon, Steve Riskin, Patrick Cronin, and Dan Snodderly. Tommy Steiner kindly commented on this paper. Back.
Note 2: On the analysis of key words see Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1976) and Anna Wierzbicka, Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Back.
Note 3: See Raymond Cohen “The Great Tradition: The Spread of Diplomacy in the Ancient World,” Diplomacy & Statecraft, forthcoming. Back.
Note 4: Raymond Cohen, “All in the Family: Ancient Near Eastern Diplomacy,” International Negotiation, 1, 1996, 11–28. Back.
Note 5: For the semantic similarities underpinning European languages see David G. Mandelbaum, ed., Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality (Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1963), 33. Back.
Note 6: R.E. Asher, ed.-in-chief, The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1994), 5169. Back.
Note 7: John B. Carroll, ed., Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956), 148. Back.
Note 8: George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of language and translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Second edition, 1992). Back.
Note 9: Tom McArthur, ed., The Oxford Companion To The English Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Abridged Edition, 1996), 525–526. Back.
Note 10: But see Igor Korchilov, Translating History (New York: Scribner, 1997). Back.
Note 11: Carroll, Language, Thought, and Reality, 218. Back.
Note 12: Mandelbaum, Selected Writings of Edward Sapir, 162. Back.
Note 14: Steiner, After Babel, 98. Back.
Note 15: See Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (London: Penguin, 1994), chapter 5. Back.
Note 16: Steiner, After Babel, 291. Back.
Note 17: Asher, The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3661. Back.
Note 18: Alfred Bloom, “Linguistic Impediments to Cross-Cultural Communication: Chinese Hassles with the Hypothetical,” Journal of Peace Science, 2, 1977, 205–14. Back.
Note 19: Mandelbaum, Selected Writings of Edward Sapir, 36. Back.
Note 20: Asher, The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 4677–8. Back.
Note 21: Thanks are due here to the research assistance of Efrat Habaron and Sharon Shuval. Back.
Note 22: (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993 edition), 1561. Back.
Note 23: Service Diary, Vol. 2 (Hebrew. Tel Aviv: Ma’ariv, 1979), 487. Back.
Note 24: The Rabin Memoirs (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 272. Back.
Note 25: Reuven Alkalay, Complete Hebrew-English Dictionary (Tel Aviv: Yediot Ahronot, 1990), 643. Back.
Note 26: Lesley Brown (ed.), The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 1970. Back.
Note 27: Leviticus 19:14. Back.
Note 28: Moshe Arens, War and Peace in the Middle East 1988–1992 (Hebrew. Tel Aviv: Yediot Ahronot, 1995), 298. Back.
Note 29: Mala Tabory, Multilingualism In International Law And Institutions (Alphen aan den Rijn: Sijthoff & Noordhoff, 1980), 112, 117, 131–5. Back.
Note 30: Also found are the phrases “territory for peace” and “land for peace”. Back.
Note 33: Psalms 122: 6, translation from Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (The Jewish Publication Society: Philadelphia, 1985), 1262. Shalva is a synonym of shalom. Back.
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