The discourse marker odnosno at the ICTY: A case of disputed translation in war crime trials

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The discourse marker odnosno at the ICTY: A case ofdisputed translation in war crime trials

Mirjana Miskovic-Lukovic a,1,*, Mirjana N. Dedaic b,2

aUniversity of Kragujevac, Faculty of Philology and Arts, Jovana Cvijica bb, Kragujevac, SerbiabGeorgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA

Received 15 February 2012; received in revised form 3 June 2012; accepted 14 June 2012

Abstract

What discourse markers mean depends not only on the local context (co-text), but also, and more widely, on global contexts such aspolitical, ideological and institutional. This conclusion was derived from our cognitive and sociopragmatic analysis of the translation of theBosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS)3 discourse marker odnosno (‘that is’, ‘in other words’), which generally has two dominant functions:distributive and reformulative. We introduce a novel insight into this problem by applying the relevance-theoretic framework of ad hocconcept construction as our analytical apparatus. The selection of interpretation is analysed on the data from a trial at the InternationalCriminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in which the defence legal team disputed the way odnosno was translated by courttranslators/interpreters in several instances. We find the cognitive options that were taken as resources for the evasion of translator'sresponsibility towards a ‘‘disagreeable’’meaning. By choosing themost neutral translation, however, the translator often steps aside fromthe court-required direct translation type.© 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Ad hoc concept construction; Discourse marker; Interpretive use; Procedural meaning; Reformulation; Translation; Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian

Judge Antonetti: Mr. Dixon has just said that the word ‘‘odnosno’’means ‘‘and’’ [. . .] The interpreters, however, havetranslated this word differently. They didn’t say ‘‘and’’. They translated this word as ‘‘meaning’’ or ‘‘in other words’’.So we have a problem which has to be solved.

(IT-01-47 Hadzihasanovic et al. Day: January 26, 2005, Page Number: 14865)

Ms. Residovic: In our language, it depends on what the author of the text wanted to say. The word ‘‘odnosno’’ can betranslated differently in other languages.

(IT-01-47 Hadzihasanovic et al. Day: January 26, 2005, Page Number: 14866)

www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 1355--1377

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +381 62 51 49 81; fax: +381 11 39 42 236.E-mail addresses: [email protected] (M. Miskovic-Lukovic), [email protected] (M.N. Dedaic).

1 The co-authorship of Mirjana Miskovic-Lukovic has been conducted as part of the project Dinamika struktura savremenog srpskog jezika(178014) (‘The dynamics of structures in the contemporary Serbian language’), which is supported by the Ministry of Education and Science of theRepublic of Serbia.

2 Permanent address: 403 North Saint Asaph Street, Alexandria, VA 22314, USA.3 Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian has become a standard way to refer to the currently recognized post-Yugoslav national variants of the pluricentric

language that used to be called Serbo-Croatian. The Montenegrin variant is still not included, although Montenegrin linguists and state authoritiesare pushing for the recognition of their own standardized variant. For more on this issue see Miskovic-Lukovic and Dedaic (2010:12--17).

0378-2166/$ -- see front matter © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.06.013


1. Introduction

This study considers the semantics and pragmatics of disputed uses of the word odnosno in a selected trial at theInternational Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) discoursemarker odnosno (‘that is’, ‘in other words’) appears to be a frequent stumbling block in war-related testimonies atthe ICTY, and has been discussed in a number of trials as its translation into English has been disputed by eitherthe prosecution or by the defence. The following quotation gives an idea of what this marker is about and what it isdoing:

Judge Antonetti: I myself have noted that several witnesses have used this word, and I was tempted to ask them toexplain the word, but that would mean entering a discussion on grammar, and that was not why the witness came. Inoted that Madam Residovic also used the word very often. I was going to ask her to tell us what she means whenshe uses it.4

(IT-01-47 Hadzihasanovic et al. Day: March 10, 2005, Page Number: 17151)

The problem has been recognised and periodically discussed by ICTY prosecutors and defence, especially in the trialof Enver Hadzihasanovic and Amir Kubura, top commanders in the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslavwars in the 1990s.5 The trial began in 2001 when the two were arrested and brought to The Hague. In 2005, the TrialChamber sentenced Bosnian Army general Enver Hadzihasanovic to five years imprisonment and Bosnian Army ColonelAmir Kubura to two and a half years for failing to take necessary and reasonable measures to prevent or punish severalcrimes which had been committed by the forces under their command in central Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993 and thebeginning of 1994. The Trial Chamber acquitted the accused of a number of other crimes. Later, Hadzihasanovic’ssentence was reduced to three and a half years, and Kubura's to two years.

We examined the transcripts from the trial available on the Hague Tribunal's web site and selected all the scripts thatcontained the word odnosno -- twenty-four in total.6 Each instance was checked against the original source, except for onewhose source text was not published on the ICTY site (example (15a)).

The rest of the paper attempts to formulate a coherent semantic and pragmatic description of odnosno based on thedata offered in the scripts from this trial. We begin with theoretical premises that govern our analysis (section 2) andcontinue with previous, scant, accounts of odnosno (section 3), which we reconsider from the perspective of two semanticdistinctions (section 4). We then go on to analyse the actual data (section 5) with the aim of capturing the semanticmeaning and pragmatic functions of odnosno using Carston's (2002) framework of ad hoc concept construction as ouranalytical apparatus. In section 6, we give a sociopragmatic account of the reasons for translators’ choices of themeaningof odnosno in certain contexts. In the last section we sum up our findings.

2. Theoretical underpinning

Relevance theory offers an explanatorily adequate, cognitive, account of human communication. It introduces a singlepragmatic criterion -- relevance -- which is considered to be universal, subconscious and applicable without exception. Inorder to explain the semantics and pragmatics of odnosno-utterances, we base our discussion on one central question:how does an odnosno-utterance achieve optimal relevance for the hearer?7

Ostensive communication, which need not be linguistically encoded, is overt and intended. An utterance as a verbalinstance of an ostensively communicated act conveys a presumption that it is optimally relevant. In other words, given thatthe speaker has produced an utterance, the hearer takes it for granted that the utterance is not only relevant enough todeserve his attention, but is also themost relevant in terms of the speaker's cognitive context.8 Cognitive context is guidedby abilities and preferences of the translator who filters the meaning through his or her understanding of an utteranceplaced in a very specific sociopragmatic context. In some cases the translator's cognitive context might contribute to theformation of ideological discourse in the target language. The translator's cognitive context is influenced also by the

M. Miskovic-Lukovic, M.N. Dedaic / Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 1355--13771356

4 Ms Residovic, a Sarajevo-based attorney who represented defence in several cases brought to the ICTY, responded by not directly answeringthe judge's question ‘‘what she means when she uses it’’. The reader is asked to maintain the suspense until section 4 where we cite theinterpreter's evasive response, which serves us as a starting point for the analysis of the role of odnosno in trail-related texts.

5 A sample of the data which we discuss in this study is given in Appendix A.6 http://www.ictytranscripts.org/Databases/TextSearchIndex.php?FolName=transe47&TFBool=1&TxtFld=odnosno. Statistics about the trial

are available on the following page: http://www.icty.org/x/cases/hadzihasanovic kubura/cis/en/cis hadzihasanovic kubura en.pdf.7 This section is mainly based on Sperber and Wilson (1986/95, 2005), Blakemore (2002), and Carston (2002).8 In relevance theory, context is considered to be a cognitive phenomenon. It is defined as a ‘‘subset of mentally represented assumptions

which interacts with newly impinging information [...] to give rise to ‘contextual effects’’’ (Carston, 2002:376).


specific local register of the text -- customarily called legal discourse -- which places its specific rules and restrictions on thetranslator's freedom.9

Relevance is a two-sided property of an utterance: on the one hand, it decreases with the cognitive effort the hearer hasto invest in the interpretation of an utterance, but then again it increases with the cognitive effects a successfullyinterpreted utterance brings about. Certain discourse or pragmatic markers,10 for example, are remarkably potentlinguistic tools for highlighting a particular cognitive effect, and thus for reducing the hearer's processing effort:

(1) My neighbour gossips with relish; moreover, he's bought a telescope.(2) George was waiting eagerly for Peppa's return, but he fell asleep in the end.(3) The old dragon has rebuked her butler sternly. So, she's rapidly regaining her energy.

In (1),moreovermakes prominent the cognitive effect of strengthening an existing assumption, namely, that the followingutterance is to be interpreted as evidence for the statement given in the preceding utterance (e.g., the fact that thespeaker's neighbour has bought a telescope, presumably for spying on his neighbours, confirms the speaker's belief thathe is prone to gossiping). In (2), but makes prominent the cognitive effect of eliminating an existing assumption, namely,that the following utterance is to be interpreted as denying an aspect of the interpretation of the preceding utterance (e.g.,the contradictory assumption that George would stay wide awake). In (3), so makes prominent the cognitive effect ofcontextual implication, namely, that the following utterance is to be interpreted as ‘‘logically’’ following from the evidencegiven in the previous utterance (e.g., the conclusion that the referent in question is rapidly regaining her energy,presumably after a serious illness, has been reached on the premise that she has resumed her habit of bossing her staffaround).

When a speaker produces an utterance, she aims at getting across a wide array of strongly or weakly communicatedassumptions, some of which are explicitly or implicitly communicated. An explicit assumption -- proposition expressed/(base-level) explicature11 or higher-level explicature -- crucially depends on the pragmatic development of a linguisticallyencoded representation of an utterance (i.e., the phonetics, morphosyntax and semantics of an utterance). An implicitproposition -- implicature -- is a further contextual assumption (implicated premise) or contextual implication (implicatedconclusion) which is pragmatically derived on the basis of explicature, but is not dependent on it. Example (4), modelledon Carston (2002:45), illustrates the relevance-theoretic explicit/implicit distinction shown in (5)12:

(4) Kay: How about a glass of whiskey or vodka?May (happily): I don’t drink.

M. Miskovic-Lukovic, M.N. Dedaic / Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 1355--1377 1357

9 Ellen Elias-Bursac, who spent several years as an ICTY BCS-English translator/interpreter, conveyed the following (personal communica-tion): ‘‘The Conference and Languages Services Section (CLSS) coordinates the work of translation and interpreting at the International CriminalTribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. CLSS includes units for French (English to French) and English translation (from and to BCS and a number ofother languages) and a unit for conference interpreters who work into and out of French, English, and the languages of the former Yugoslavia. TheEnglish Translation Unit has some 20 translators translating documentary evidence into English to be tendered in court, while the ConferenceInterpreting Unit has some 25 interpreters who interpret simultaneously from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian into English in the courtroom. With afew exceptions, these translators and interpreters are native speakers of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian; hence English is their second language.Many were professional interpreters and translators before the war, but a significant number worked first in the field during the war and then cameto the Tribunal where they received their full professional training.’’ A current ICTY English-BCS-English translator/interpreter who wished toremain unidentified, explained, ‘‘there is a pressure at ICTY to translate words and sentences in their broad, everyday, non-controversialmeaning. If there is a possibility for the slightest of disagreements about the proper meaning of a word, it should be left to the parties to litigate it,the thinking goes. This is especially the case now, in the latter days of the Tribunal, when the documents are mostly used in court and not forinvestigative purposes. Written translations go through at least one revision, so the final wording is normally something with which at least twopeople agree. The interpreters are in a similar position (as translators of the written texts) but for two important differences. One, they have far lesstime to think and no time to revise their output. Two, their output is their own voice; it is far more personal than printed translation of an unknownprovenance -- so they (we) tend to make it even more neutral to avoid any possibility of being accused of error or, worse, partisanship.’’10 The concept of discourse markers has received much scholarly attention in the past decades (cf. for example Fraser, 1996; Schourup, 1999;Blakemore, 2002). Although the term pragmatic marker seems to prevail in the relevance-theoretic literature (cf. Andersen and Fretheim, 2000), inthis paper we have opted for the term discourse markermerely as a matter of terminological convenience given that the latter term is more widelyused. Miskovic-Lukovic and Dedaic (2010) give a detailed survey of the controversies surrounding the discourse/pragmatic and marker/particledistinctions.11 There might not be one-to-one correspondence between the two constructs: the proposition expressed by an utterance is a result of aninferential enrichment of the semantic representation of an uttered sentence. It becomes the (base-level) explicature only when it is commu-nicated by the speaker (see Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95 for a relevance-theoretic account of irony).12 It would be a costly interpretive enterprise if, in actual interaction, the hearer represented all potential assumptions triggered by an utterance.On the contrary, he will do so only if a particular context forces him to. In the above example, for instance, it is unlikely that Kay will ever representthe propositional attitude representation (5d) or even the illocutionary representation (5c).


(5) a. Proposition expressed: ‘MayX does not drink [alcohol]’b. Higher-level explicature: ‘MayX is happy that she does not drink [alcohol]’c. Higher-level explicature: ‘MayX is saying that she does not drink [alcohol]’d. Higher-level explicature: ‘MayX believes that she does not drink [alcohol]’e. Implicated premise: ‘If one does not drink [alcohol] then one will not have any whiskey or vodka’f. Implicated conclusion: ‘MayX will not have a glass of whiskey or vodka’

Our sequentially represented process of interpretation in (5) is in many ways inadequate as it does not correctlycapture what actually happens in interaction. In fact, utterance interpretation as a fast, automatic and on-line process,typically involves the process of mutual parallel adjustment of different factors involved: the explicit content of anutterance, various contextual assumptions which the utterance highlights and cognitive effects. The aim is to satisfy thehearer's expectations of relevance which have been raised on a particular occasion of utterance.13 In considering differentinterpretations according to the extent to which they are accessible, the hearer will follow a path of least effort and willterminate the interpretive process when he has reached such an interpretation that can satisfy his expectation ofrelevance.

When interaction ismediated by translation of the source text (ST), the question of mutual parallel adjustment becomesmore complicated since translation involves two sets of factors for ostensive-inferential communication14 -- one from theoriginal communication, the other from the translated part. We followGutt's (1989:75, 2000) distinction between direct andindirect translation, in which ‘‘direct translation corresponds to the idea that translation should convey the same meaningas the original, and indirect translation involves a looser degree of faithfulness.’’15When discussing translation conductedin an international court, we assume that relevant translation is of the direct type. Direct translation is successful if and onlyif it conveys the interpretation of the original when interpreted with regard to the original context. To test for thesuccessfulness of odnosno-utterances in our data, we search for interpretations as they relate to ideologically more orless imbued cognitive context.

3. Preliminary notes on odnosno

Even though the word odnosno is quite pervasive in ordinary communication, it has not been given much attention inliterature. Below, we offer a cursory overview of some existing proposals, but first we briefly explain the derivation of thisword.

The root of odnosno, which has neither homonyms in BSC nor cognates in other Slavic languages, is odnos -- ‘relation’,‘relationship’, ‘ratio’, ‘connection’, ‘bearing’. The word formation follows a standard pattern in BCS, namely, the derivationof an adverb from the neuter gender of an adjective. The adjectives derived from the root noun odnos are odnosan(masculine), odnosna (feminine) and odnosno (neuter).

For odnosno, Serbo-Croatian-English dictionaries, such as Benson (1991:353), cite two lexical senses: one is that ofthe preposition odnosno ‘in reference to’ and ‘in regard to’, which is used in genitive constructions as in (6) (modelled onBenson's translation), the other is that of the particle16 odnosno ‘that is’, ‘in other words’ and ‘more exactly’ as in (7)(Benson's translation):

(6) Odnosno vaseg e-maila, doneli smo sledecu odluku.‘In regard to your e-mail, we have reached the following decision.’

(7) To ce uticati na potrosače, odnosno na prodaju.‘That will affect consumers, that is (more exactly) the sale.’

(Benson, 1991:353)


13 This means that context is not static and pre-given but is selected in line with the speaker's utterance and the hearer's search for optimalrelevance (see Blakemore, 1992 for a detailed account of context selection in relevance-theoretic terms).14 According to Sperber and Wilson (1986/95), the essential factors of ostensive-inferential communication are the communicator, the stimulus,the audience, and the set of assumptions needed to be communicated.15 The terms direct and indirect reflect the distinction between direct and indirect speech: direct speech conveys the original more or lesstruthfully, while indirect speech conveys what the speaker thinks was relevant in the original, or what the speaker believes to be relevant to theaudience.16 The term particle here refers to the traditional grammarian meaning, and should not be confused with the pragmatic description of discourseparticle. We use Benson's term (1991:353).


On the other hand, English-Croatian or Serbian dictionaries, such as Filipovic (1989:907,910), translate the prepositionalphrase in (with) reference to as ‘u vezi sa’ (lit. in connection with), ‘odnosno’, ‘sto se tiče’ (lit. that which concerns) and ‘upogledu na’ (lit. in view of) while the prepositional phrase in regard to is confined to ‘sto se tiče’ and ‘glede’ (lit. regarding).The particle translations are not listed in Filipovic.

Anic (1991:404) gives two meanings for odnosno both of which are categorised as adverbial: to jest, zapravo (‘that is’)and sto se tiče svakog pojedinog (u nabrajanju) (‘as it concerns each item in enumeration’).

Examples (8) and (9), respectively, illustrate what Klajn (1997:120) considers to be correct and incorrect usages of theword odnosno (our translations):

(8) Crvenom i plavom bojom označena je topla odnosno hladna voda.‘The red and blue colours denote warm and cold water respectively.’

(9) Krece se kao kraljica u sahu, odnosno pravo i po dijagonali.‘[It/(s)he] moves like the queen in the game of chess, that is/in other words, [both] straight and diagonally.’

Klajn defines themeaning of the word odnosno as ‘‘a choice between two ormore possibilities’’ (‘izbor izmepu dveju ili visemogucnosti’), as shown in (8). The usage in (9), which is claimed to be found ‘‘in explanations of the same thing in otherwords’’, is a result of an incorrect replacement of the word to jest ‘that is’with the word odnosno (‘pogresno se upotrebljavaza objasnjenje iste stvari drugim rečima [. . .] gde umesto odnosno treba reci to jest’, Klajn, 1997:120).

Velčic (1987:72) includes odnosno in a list of explicative connectives among such words and phrases as are naime‘namely’, to jest/tj. ‘that is’, drugim rečima ‘in other words’, točnije rečeno ‘more precisely said’, jednostavnije rečeno ‘moresimply said’, to znači da ‘it means that’ and to ce reci da ‘it will be said that’. More specifically, the explicative odnosno(together with naime) is put into a class of adverbial connectives; for example, the connections between juxtaposedutterances in (10) are made explicit in (11) (our translations):

(10) Govorno ponasanje djeteta u početku je egocentrično. Dijete se ne usmjeruje na svog sugovornika. Dijete čestogovori samo za sebe.‘The verbal behaviour of a child is egocentric at first. The child does not focus on his/her interlocutor. The childoften speaks only to him-/herself.’

(11) Govorno ponasanje djeteta u početku je egocentrično, odnosno dijete se ne usmjeruje na svogsugovornika, vec (nego) često govori samo za sebe.‘The verbal behaviour of a child is egocentric at first, that is/in other words, the child does not focus onhis/her interlocutor, rather, the child often speaks only to him-/herself.’

(Velčic, 1987:72)

Arguing against an earlier account of odnosno (Ivir et al., 1973) according to which, odnosno introduces reformulations ofprevious propositional contents, Velčic claims that this connective has, in fact, two main functions -- explanatory andcorrective/reformulative.17 The main purpose of using odnosno, says Velčic, lies in confirming the truthfulness of theproposition expressed by an utterance:

Sto je govornik manje siguran u uspjesnost eksplikacija, tj. u afirmaciju istinitosti sadrzaja koji pojasnjuju,pojasnjenje ce signalizirati s pomocu gramatikaliziranih eksplikativa, kao sto su naime i odnosno. Ono ce seaktualizirati u tom slučaju ovako: sadrzajima koji pojasnjuju upucujem na prethodno, ali se to vjerovatno moze boljepojasniti, konkretizirati, poopciti i sl.18

(Velčic, 1987:78--79)


17 According to Velčic, explicatives are part of a structure which further explains what has already been stated, typically marking the content off.However, what distinguishes odnosno (and tj. ‘i.e.’) from other explicatives is its syntactic behaviour: odnosno has a stable position in a complexstructure. Unlike naime ‘namely’, odnosno cannot occur within an explicative structure (our translation):

Govorno ponasanje djeteta u početku je egocentrično. Dijete se *odnosno ne usmjeruje na svog sugovornika.‘The verbal behaviour of a child is egocentric at first. The child does not *that is/in other words focus on his/her interlocutor.’ (Velčic, 1987:74)

18 ‘‘To an extent a speaker is less certain of the success of her explications, that is, in the affirmation of the truthfulness of contents that explain,the explanation will be signalled by grammaticalised explicatives such as naime and odnosno. The explanation will be actualised in the followingway: with contents that explain, I refer back to what has previously been stated, but it is possible that there may be a better way of explaining,making it more precise, generalising, etc.’’


4. Odnosno in relation to two semantic distinctions

In order to account for the meaning of the word odnosno, we briefly introduce two semantic distinctions: one is acognitive-semantic distinction about the relation between a linguistic form and its role in interpretation; the other is a truth-conditional distinction between a mentally represented concept and its content.19

In a nutshell, a linguistic form can map onto two types of cognitive information: concepts and procedures. Words withconceptual meaning are constituents of mental representations (e.g., the so-called ‘content words’ such as frame, installand user-friendly). Words with procedural meaning tell us how tomanipulate these representations, or in other words, howdiscourse markers constrain processes of pragmatic inference (e.g., discourse connectives such as moreover, but andso, and discourse particles such as kinda and sorta20).

However, the conceptual/procedural distinction of translational semantics does not coincide with the truth-conditional/non-truth-conditional distinction of philosophical semantics. For example, (13) shows that the conceptual sentenceadverbial frankly does not affect the truth conditions of the (base-level) explicature of utterance in (12) while the proceduraldeterminer his does:

(12) Frankly, his moments of glory belong to bygone days.

(13) a. Proposition expressed: ‘His [Edward's] moments of glory belong to bygone days’b. Higher-level explicature: ‘The speaker is telling the hearer frankly’ (that his [Edward's] moments of glory

belong to bygone days)

We shall be using the two distinctions -- cognitive-semantic and truth-conditional-semantic -- to explore the relationsbetween the syntactic categories and uses lumped together in the linguistic form of odnosno.

Based on the earlier accounts presented in section 3, we have identified four token-types (repeated below forconvenience):

(14) a. ?Odnosno vaseg e-maila, doneli smo sledecu odluku.‘In regard to your e-mail, we have reached the following decision.’

b. Crvenom i plavom bojom označena je topla odnosno hladna voda.‘The red and blue colours denote warm and cold water respectively.’

c. To ce uticati na potrosače, odnosno na prodaju.‘That will affect consumers, that is (more exactly) the sale.’

d. Krece se kao kraljica u sahu, odnosno pravo i po dijagonali.‘[It/(s)he] moves like the queen in the game of chess, that is/in other words/namely/more exactly/more precisely, [both] straight and diagonally.’

(14a) and (14b) are relatively straightforward cases. Odnosno in (14a), just by being a preposition, encodes conceptualinformation, but it does not contribute to the truth conditions of the proposition expressed by the utterance (‘The speakerand her group have reached a certain decision’).21 Rather, it forms a constituent of a higher-level explicature which servesas an illocutionary commentary on the (base-level) explicature.22 Odnosno in (14b) is a connective which forms aconstituent of the proposition expressed affecting its truth conditions (otherwise, the utterance would be perceived ascontradictory).23


19 This section is mainly based on Blakemore (1987, 2002), Blass (1990) and Carston (2002).20 According to Tabor 1993 (cited in Traugott, 1999:188), the degree modifiers kinda and sorta were derived from the fuller forms kind of and sortof. See also Miskovic-Lukovic (2009) for a semantic and pragmatic analysis of the particles.21 While it can be found in some dictionaries, this use has become obsolete in all the BCS variants. This is one of the indicators that odnosno hasundergone the process of grammaticalisation (Hopper and Traugott, 1993; Traugott, 1997).22 Higher-level explicatures (just like implicatures) may be true or false per se simply because they are propositions. However, the truthconditions of an utterance rest solely on the pragmatically enriched semantic representation of an utterance (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95).23 There are two relevance-theoretic approaches to the connective and: (i) and encodes conceptual information of the logical connective ‘&’ (withother meanings, such as temporal and resultative, being pragmatically derived as part of the proposition expressed); (ii) and encodes proceduralinformation about the conjuncts being relevant only if taken together. In Grice's pragmatics, by contrast, the other meanings surface at the level ofconversational implicature, more precisely, in the form of generalised implicature (Grice, 1989; Blakemore, 2002; Carston, 2002).


(14c) and (14d) appear to be contentious. We discuss them in section 5 where we examine the data that prompted ourinvestigation of the word odnosno.24 But before we continue, we quote the interpreter's response to the judge's questiongiven in the introduction. The court discussions provide an insight into a pertinent metalinguistic discussion in courtroomproceedings and are therefore noteworthy:

Ms. Residovic: the word ‘‘odnosno’’ is frequently used in different contexts with a different meaning, and the drafterof the document, or the person who is speaking would be in the best position to explain then in what sense the wordwas used.

(IT-01-47 Hadzihasanovic et al. Day: March 10, 2005, Page Number: 17153)

The contextual explanation by Ms. Residovic points to the non-conceptual nature of the meaning of the marker odnosno.Before we go on to discuss it, we introduce the pragmatic process of ad hoc concept construction as we find it cruciallyrelevant to our analysis.

4.1. Ad hoc concept construction

Relevance theory provides a coherent theoretic framework for an exploration of the semantic meaning and pragmaticroles of the marker odnosno. A relevance-theoretic analysis, as we shall see, may account for the variability andsystematicity of a range of apparently divergent interpretations. In particular, we shall rely on Carston's (2002) idea ofstrengthening/ narrowing and loosening/broadening of concepts in ad hoc concept construction. This variety of pragmaticenrichment seems capable of adequately accommodating the contentious issue of the core meaning and different uses ofthis word, especially its role of a discourse marker.25

Carston (2002:322--323) describes the notion of ad hoc concept, which is recovered during interpretation, as notnecessarily a novel or one-off occurrence. She stresses that ‘‘the basic characteristic of an ad hoc concept is that it isaccessed in a particular context by a spontaneous process of pragmatic inference, as distinct from a concept which isaccessed by the process of lexical decoding and so is context-invariant’’. Further, she explains that the relevant, i.e., adhoc concept is ‘‘constructed out of the logical and encyclopaedic information which is made accessible by the encodedlexical concept. Whether the construction process is strictly speaking a loosening or an enrichment, or a combination ofthe two, does not seem consequential and certainly should not lead to two utterly different ways of treating the resultantconcept’’ (2002:347).

The pragmatic process of ad hoc concept construction relies on the linguistic underdeterminacy thesis according towhich, natural language sentences do not fully encode propositional conceptual representations (with determinate truthconditions), and therefore require a further pragmatic enrichment. The corollary of this thesis, at the lexical-semanticlevel, is that words (especially other than natural-kind terms) serve as templates for the construction of concepts (or aspointers to particular conceptual spaces). The actual, communicated concepts are then pragmatically inferred incontext.26

Ad hoc concept formation, as one of the pragmatic processes that contribute to the development of the propositionexpressed/(base-level) explicature (and therefore to its truth conditions), establishes an inferential relation between theconcept which is linguistically encoded as a constituent of the semantic representation of an uttered sentence and thepragmatically adjusted, communicated (i.e., speaker-intended) conceptual constituent of the speaker's utterance. It isclosely tied to the relevance-theoretic stance that ordinary verbal communication has two characteristics, namely,linguistic expressions are loosely used and they stand in a resemblance-relation27 to the underlying thought (Sperber andWilson, 1986/95).

Let us illustrate the pragmatic process of ad hoc concept formation with two simple examples: lexical strengthening inwhich the communicated concept is made more specific than the encoded concept as a result of a narrowing of the


24 (14d) (and (11)) exemplifies a typical usage of odnosno in ordinary communication. Strangely enough, Velčic (1987) dedicates a few lines tothis meaning while Klajn (1997) entirely dismisses it as incorrect.25 Burton-Robert (2007:110), however, argues against the process of concept adjustment and the conceptual/procedural distinction along thelines of relevance theory on the bases that ‘‘all linguistic ‘meaning’ (encoding) is procedural -- M-representationally [a representation of somethingelse] pointing the hearer towards structures in LoT [Language of Thought], the unique locus of conceptual-intentional (i.e., semantic) properties’’.26 Roughly, a monomorphemic word encodes an atomic concept, which has a conceptual address in memory that is filled with the followinginformation: a set of inference rules for analytic implications of the concept (logical entry), general and particular assumptions of the concept(encyclopaedic entry) and information about the phonetics, phonology and syntax of the word that encodes the concept (lexical entry).27 Interpretive resemblance refers to the assumption that verbal communication is good enough if the interpretation has adequate analytic andsynthetic implications of what the speaker intended to communicate in her utterance. This assumption is further elaborated in Carston (2002:340): ‘‘The use is a literal one if the logical/definitional properties of the linguistic encoding are preserved; it is non-literal if they are not’’.


linguistically specified denotation, and lexical loosening in which the communicated concept is made more general thanthe encoded concept as a result of a broadening of the linguistically specified denotation.28

Assuming that the referent of the determiner phraseVladimir is an adult person with normal psychological and physicalabilities, the utterance Vladimir je pravo dete ‘Vladimir is such a child’, would be interpreted as a contradiction if theinterlocutor solely relied on the linguistically encoded meaning of dete ‘child’. The interpretive process, in fact, proceedsalong the following lines: the linguistically encoded concept DETE ‘CHILD’ is modulated in such a way that certainencyclopaedic information about the characteristics and behaviour of children (e.g., ‘Vladimir likes to shoot at a cat with awater pistol’, ‘Vladimir enjoys splashing people in the swimming-pool’, ‘Vladimir enjoys riding on a merry-go-round inamusement parks’, etc.) becomes part of the defining property of the linguistically encoded concept.

The following example is a refrain from a popular, ex-Yugoslav song: Ruzice, ruzo, Ruska, zrela si ko kruska ‘Oh,Ruzica, rose, Ruska, you are as ripe as a pear’. The word ruza ‘rose’ is metaphorically used given that the concept of aperson to which the proper names Ruzica and Ruska refer cannot be part of the denotation of this word, but it may formpart of a broader denotation which would include certain encyclopaedic properties of roses (e.g., beautiful, fragrant,cherished, delicate, sentient, etc.).

As we have seen, the pragmatic process of ad hoc concept construction typically involves a linguistically encodedconcept that is in the context of an utterance pragmatically adjusted to yield a communicated concept. The varietydescribed in this paper is specific inasmuch as the communicated concept also happens to be linguistically encoded. Inthe following section we put forward a relevance-theoretic analysis of the discourse marker odnosno as a proceduralconstraint on the pragmatic process of explicature construction through ad hoc concept formation.

5. A relevance-theoretic analysis of odnosno

The excerpted dispute quoted earlier was triggered by the English translation of odnosno in (15a) for which we do nothave a BCS original:

(15) a. There have been some cases of members of the 7th Muslim Mujahedin Brigade being mistreated.

It was argued that the crucial word and was omitted and that the correct rendering of the original should, in fact, be (15b):

(15) b. There have been some cases of the 7th Muslim Brigade and the Mujahedin being mistreated.

In other words, leaving out the connective meaning of odnosno (either by not translating it at all (Ø) or by implying itsreformulatory meaning ‘in other words’ and ‘that is’) resulted in equating the concepts of MUSLIM and MUJAHEDIN.29

The rationale behind this argument was found in the translation of (16a) into (16b), and the impossibility of (16c):

(16) a. 1993 odnosno 1994b. 1993 and 1994c. *1993, in other words 1994

The problem with correctly translating these examples lies in the fact that they are not as straightforward as they appear.The relevance of utterance (16a) cannot be reduced to the and-conjunction; for example, it does not mean that theconjunction is true if and only if both conjuncts are true (the conceptual meaning of and); nor does it mean that theconjunction achieves relevance beyond and above the separate conjuncts (the procedural meaning of and). Therelevance of the odnosno-utterance in (16a) lies in a contrastive relation between the two conjuncts (without a suggestionof a disjunctive relation30). In the first conjunct, the linguistically encoded concept 1993 ‘the whole calendar year’ equalsthe communicated concept 1993* ‘the whole calendar year’, so there is, in fact, no conceptual adjustment here.31 By


28 Lexical broadening has several varieties. Approximation, hyperbole andmetaphor, for instance, differ in the extent to which the communicatedconcept departs from the encoded one.29 In contemporary American and European politics, the word Mujahedin has acquired a negative connotation being typically associated withterrorist activities of Muslim fanatics from Arab countries, who are led to believe that they are waging a holy war against the Infidels (i.e., Christiancountries) personified in the U.S.A.30 Although or can quite commonly be a reformulation marker in English, replacement with the corresponding BCS word ili (1993 ili 1994 ‘1993 or1994’) would bring in an exclusive interpretation of (16a) and would implicate the speaker's/interpreter's uncertainty as to which of the disjunctsmight be true.31 In line with relevance-theoretic practices, we use capital letters for linguistically encoded concepts and capital letters with asterisk to refer tocommunicated concepts (Carston, 2002).


contrast, the linguistically encoded concept 1994 is used in a vague sense in the second conjunct: the defining property ofthe temporal unit year (‘time taken by the earth in making one revolution round the sun/365¼ days’) is being dropped sothat the communicated concept 1994* is loosely interpreted in a sense ‘not covering the whole calendar year’ (in thisparticular case ‘the beginning of 1994’).32

As we said earlier, the original transcript of (15a) was not published on the ICTY site (only the quoted dispute), but to anative speaker the contentious part would run as (17a), and if we are right, it would translate as (17b):

(17) a. [...] članovi 7. muslimanske brigade, odnosno Mudzahedinib. [...] members of the 7th Muslim brigade, that is, the Mujahedin

The relevance of (17a) lies, in our view, in the speaker's on-line, subsequent assessment of the hearer's cognitiveenvironment: the extent to which the hearer can access the encyclopaedic content of the linguistically encoded concept7TH MUSLIM BRIGADE. The odnosno-utterance may be interpreted as repair of a sort which saves the hearer'sprocessing effort in determining the referents involved. In other words, the speaker is explicating the linguistically encodedconcept 7TH MUSLIM BRIGADE as THE MUJAHEDIN*.33 To elaborate, odnosno as a reformulation marker establishesan inferential connection between the propositional constituents PC1 (e.g., 7th Muslim brigade) and PC2 (e.g., theMujahedin) such that it signals to the interlocutor that he need not go any further in the interpretation ofPC1 but simply takePC2 as the concept the speaker intended to communicate by using the concept linguistically encoded in PC1. The twoconstituents are similar in that they are both linguistically encoded in an utterance (here 17b), but they differ in that PC1 issupposed to be interpreted as a lexical concept (7TH MUSLIM BRIGADE) and PC2 as its corresponding communicatedconcept (THE MUJAHEDIN*).

Our conclusion is supported by excerpt (q) in Appendix A, which consistently equates the linguistically encodedconcepts MUSLIMS, ORTHODOX and CATHOLICS with the explicated (communicated) concepts BOSNIAKS, SERBSand CROATS, respectively, which, clearly, cannot be true in terms of the semantic truth-conditional distinction. Therelevance of (q) lies, in fact, in modulating the linguistically encoded concepts MUSLIMS, ORTHODOX and CATHOLICSin such a way that they become loosely interpreted (i.e., by dropping the defining property of the lexical concepts, viz. ‘amember of a particular religious group’); moreover, such interpretation should then equal the concepts linguisticallyencoded in BOSNIAKS, SERBS and CROATS, respectively, which represent the concepts the speaker intended tocommunicate in the first place.34,35

Odnosno is not a true parenthetical because it standardly takes a medial position between two propositionalconstituents (or propositions) (cf. Velčic, 1987). Table 1 lists the number of occurrences of the respective Englishtranslations of odnosno according to the data in Appendix A: the most frequent renderings are the conjunction and and thedisjunction or while the meaning of the reformulation marker is less frequent, and on a par with the omissions of the word.


32 Carston (2002, ch. 3) gives a detailed relevance-theoretic analysis of the pragmatics of and. Especially relevant to our ensuing discussion ofthe function of odnosno is her account of why exemplification and restatement or reformulation cannot be conjunction cases. See Blakemore(1993, 1997) for a conceptual analysis of the discourse markers that is and in other words. Tanaka (1997) argues for a procedural analysis of themarker in other words. Miskovic-Lukovic (2006) briefly discusses the grammaticalisation of the reformulator in other words.33 The word Mujahedin may have been used in this context with the positive connotation ‘a brave warrior for a just cause’.34 The problem is, however, more complex, and lies in the sphere of connotation, more precisely, in political propaganda. What we have taken tobe the case of loosening of an encoded concept, may well depend on who the recipient of the message is. Thus, to those who have been involvedin the Yugoslav drama during the 1990s, the lexical concept appears to have, in fact, been strengthened, i.e., instead of dropping the definingproperty, an encyclopaedic property is added to this set.35 We are grateful to our anonymous reviewer for providing the following analysis of excerpt q, more precisely, of the partMuslimana, odnosnoBosnjaka, which was originally translated as ‘Muslims, or Bosniaks’, but which we discuss as if it were translated as ‘Muslims, that is, Bosniaks’.The proposed analysis goes as follows: ‘‘there are three instances of the pattern <religion> odnosno <ethnic group> [...]. The point is preciselythat the linguistically encoded concept MUSLIMS is indeterminate and in need of pragmatic narrowing to MUSLIMS*, i.e., ‘‘Muslims in formerYugoslavia’’, which, then, is presumably coreferential with the concept BOSNIAKS.’’ We believe that the two versions of the ad hoc conceptformation analysis do not differ in spirit. However, they do differ in the number of interpretive steps. Assuming the strengthening analysis (insteadof the broadening one advocated above, including the reservation we voiced in the previous footnote), there is one step fewer in our version. Thatis, we do not assume that the linguistically encoded concept in PC1 is pragmatically adjusted to a narrower (or a broader) communicated conceptat this stage of interpretation so that such a communicated concept (based on the linguistic material of PC1) is then referentially equated with thelinguistically encoded concept in PC2 (in which case PC2would just be another linguistically encoded concept and not the communicated conceptof anything except for a possibility of triggering a further conceptual adjustment, say, from BOSNIAKS to BOSNIAKS*). On the contrary, wecrucially assume that what is linguistically encoded in PC1 is spelt-out in PC2 so that the latter is the communicated concept of the former. Webelieve that our version captures the gist of the procedural semantics of the BCSword as well as the rationale behind its use. We would also like topoint out that the BCS ili ‘or’would leave the indeterminacy between the exclusive and inclusive reading of the utterance unresolved, which wouldresult in a different set of implicatures.


In the rest of this section we analyse the instances of odnosno from the trial scripts, including their English translations.The fuller versions are given in Appendix A.

5.1. Odnosno ‘and’

(18) a. prevozno sredstvo odnosno gorivo‘no vehicle to use and no fuel’

b. svi izvjestaji odnosno evidencija izbjeglih lica‘all reports and records of refugees’

c. pravilno esaloniranje snaga, odnosno organizacija dubine odbrane‘the correct echeloning of forces and the organization of the depths of the defence’

d. planirati upotrebu jedinica i grupisanje snaga shodno takvom rasporedu neprijatelja,odnosno planirati jednovremeni napad po svim elementima ovakvog b/r neprijatelja‘to plan the use of units and the grouping of forces in accordance with such a disposition of enemy forces andto plan a simultaneous attack on all the elements of such an enemy combat disposition’

e. brigade ARBiH, odnosno OpSO‘ARBH and OpSO brigades’

f. brigade [ARBiH] odnosno OpSO‘the brigades and the OpSO’

g. postigao moralni efekat odnosno razbilo vec usvojeno uvjerenje da o njima niko ne brine ida im niko ne pomaze‘render moral support, and help dispel the deeply rooted belief that they are on their own and that noassistance will come from any quarter’

h. ubrza sa točenjem cisterni, odnosno po jedna cisterna sa 30 tona krece iz Gruda sa svakih 10 vozila izkonvoja‘the loading of tankers be expedited and that one 30-ton tanker sets off from Grude with every convey of 10vehicles’

(taken from excerpts (d), (e), (i), (k), (m), (n), (o) and (p) in Appendix A)

The distributive use of odnosno ‘and (respectively)’ (see the explanation for (8)) is present only in (18e) and (18f). All theother examples have odnosno as a reformulation marker which, as we said earlier, establishes an inferential connectionbetween the propositional constituents PC1 and PC2 in which PC2 is the communicated concept of the linguisticallyencoded concept in PC1. Which specific type of relation exists between PC1 and PC2 (e.g. general-specific, abstract-instance, set-member, part-whole, object-attribute, etc.) will pragmatically be determined according to context. Thereformulation marker odnosno contributes to the relevance of a host utterance as a procedural cue that such inferentialprocesses are expected.

The metonymic transfer in (18a) -- which illustrates a set-member/whole-part relation -- is a case of overlapping(loosening and strengthening). On the one hand, the lexical concept VEHICLE in PC1 is loosened in that the definingproperty ‘an artefact used for spatial transfer’ is being dropped so that the concept becomes applicable to a wider set(which may include one of the sufficient but not necessary components of this artefact). On the other hand, thecommunicated concept FUEL* (linguistically encoded in PC2 as the speaker-intended interpretation of PC1) highlights thestrengthening of the linguistically encoded information inPC1 -- the broadened set is subsequently narrowed to that subset(of vehicles) which uses an engine in transportation (as opposed e.g., to bicycles or carts). In (18b) -- which illustrates ageneral-specific relation -- the vague lexical concept REPORTS (linguistically encoded in PC1) is strengthened to mean


Table 1Number of occurrences of odnosno in English translations.

English translations of odnosno Frequency

and 8or 7Ø 3i.e. 2that is 1and so 1or rather 1by means of‘ 1


RECORDS OF REFUGEES* (linguistically encoded in PC2) in that an encyclopaedic property (e.g. ‘institutions makerecords of refugees in war-time periods’) becomes elevated to the status of a defining property. In (18c) -- which illustratesan abstract-instance relation, the loan word esaloniranje, whose conceptual content might not be transparent to a layman(and certainly not to speakers of BCS), is spelt out in the communicated concept THE ORGANIZATION OF THE DEPTSOF THE DEFENCE* (linguistically encoded in PC2).

36 Likewise, in (18g) -- which illustrates a general-specific relation --the indeterminate content of the complex lexical concept, linguistically encoded in PC1 (the verb phrase postici moralniefekat ‘to render [i.e., ‘achieve’] moral support’) is pragmatically adjusted. The communicated concept, linguisticallyencoded in PC2, further elaborates what specific type of moral support the speaker has in mind (in terms of the varieties ofad hoc concept formation, this example illustrates pragmatic strengthening of a linguistically encoded concept). AlthoughPC1 in (18h) is quite specific in that the content of the concept TANKER LOADING is transparently compositional, it is thisspecificity that might cause misunderstanding if taken literally; the communicated concept (linguistically encoded in PC2)then serves to instantiate it by providing the reason for a speedier loading of tankers. The interpretation of (18d) -- whichillustrates the abstract-instance relation -- runs along the similar lines: the linguistic material in PC2 explicates the type ofthe conceptual adjustment (i.e., pragmatic strengthening) of the linguistic material used in PC1.

Our discussion of (18) aims at showing that the meaning conveyed by the and-translation has not captured the(inferred) meaning of the source utterances (with the exception of (18e) and (18f)), which host the reformulative odnosno(see Carston, 2002, chapter 3, for the pragmatics of and-conjunction). Odnosno, as a discourse marker, procedurallyconstrains the interpretation of the proposition expressed by a host utterance by indicating that thematerial encoded in theconstituent that follows the marker interpretively resembles the material encoded in the constituent that precedes themarker, and that it constitutes the speaker-intended information.37,38

5.2. Odnosno ‘or’

(19) a. mir, odnosno mirno rjesavanje nastalih sukoba‘peace or a peaceful solution of the present conflicts’

b. povjerenik odnosno član staba za naselje Vakuf‘commissioner or member of the Vakuf Staff ’

c. odbrana, odnosno napad‘defence or attack’

d. zivi, odnosno ima pravo da se vrati‘live or have the right to return’

(taken from excerpts (b), (g), (h) and (r) in Appendix A)

The or-translation we discuss in this section is a mixed bag. Odnosno in (19c) has the distributive reading ‘and(respectively)’ in the sense of Klajn's (1997) ‘‘correct usage’’ illustrated in (8) and Benson's BCS example (7).39 Thethree instances are also similar in that a contrastive relation is semantically encapsulated in the opposite pairs potrosači --prodaja ‘consumer -- sale’ in examples (7)/(14c), toplo -- hladno ‘warm -- cold’ in example (8), and odbrana -- napad‘defence -- attack’ in (19c) above. This, however, does not mean that a semantic contrast between PC1 and PC2 is aprerequisite for the distributive interpretation (compare (18e) and (18f)).


36 The English determiner/noun phrase echelonmeans ‘step-like formation of troops, aircraft, ships, etc.’ (Hornby et al., 1963:316). However, themilitary formation meaning is the second sense listed in the corpus-based Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary (1987:448), after the mostfrequent usage ‘a level of power or responsibility in an organisation, together with the people at that level’ (also in Webster's EncyclopedicUnabridged Dictionary of the English Language, 1989:451). The meaning of the BCS explication in PC2 is clearly different (albeit military).Nevertheless, our point remains that PC2 represents the speaker's pragmatic enrichment of PC1.37 Throughout this paper we have glossed the reformulative function of odnosno as ‘in other words’/‘that is’/‘more exactly/precisely’. However,this does not mean that we entirely endorse the translational equivalence of odnosno to these English phrases. Nor is ours a contrastive study ofthe English and BCS reformulation markers. It might well be that their respective meanings and usages differ to a higher or lesser degree. After all,odnosno also has a distributive function which is not the case with the English phrases.38 More generally, whileodnosno signals thatPC2 is the speaker's interpretation ofPC1, it does not signal a particular type of inferential (i.e., ad hoc)relation betweenPC1andPC2 (e.g., reformulation vs. exemplification, etc.); nor is it crucially necessary for a hearer to recognise the type inorder to beable to interpret an odnosno-utterance. The following quotation from Sperber andWilson (1986/95:244) illustrates our point: ‘‘It is one thing to inventfor one's own theoretical purposes a set of categories to use in classifying the utterances of native speakers, or to try to discover the set of categoriesthat native speakersuse in classifying their ownutterances. It is quite another claim that such a classification playsa necessary role in communicationand comprehension [...]. [It is] like moving from the observation that tennis players can generally classify strokes as volleys, lobs, approach shots,cross-court backhands and so on, to the conclusion that they are unable to perform or return a stroke without correctly classifying it.’’39 More precisely, to a native speaker, Benson's (1991:353) translation of (7) (repeated in (14c)), namely, To ce uticati na potrosače, odnosnona prodaju ‘That will affect consumers, that is (more exactly) the sale’ does not properly capture the meaning of the source utterance. Weconsider odnosno to be used here in the distributive sense.


The meaning of odnosno in (19a) and (19d) is that of the reformulation marker along the lines given for (18) (theabstract-instance relation): the speaker realises that the contents of the lexical concepts PEACE and LIVE (‘live as aninhabitant of a given area’), linguistically encoded in PC1, might be misinterpreted, and he strengthens them in thecommunicated concepts linguistically encoded in PC2 (PEACEFUL SOLUTION OF THE PRESENT CONFLICTS* andTHE RIGHT TO RETURN*, respectively). These communicated meanings are, in fact, rendered in a politically correct,euphemistic, manner (see our subsequent discussion of (19d) in section 6.1).

The disjunction40 in (19) is unspecific for an exclusive or inclusive interpretation except, perhaps, in (19b). In theabsence of a broader context, we cannot tell whether the referent in question had two separate functions: one as a chiefrepresentative of the inhabitants of Vakuf (irrespective of their ethnicity and religious persuasion), the other as a memberof the Vakuf Staff (organised e.g. as a political, military or governmental group). Furthermore, it might well be that (19b) is arepair in which case odnosno functions as a reformulation marker. In fact, what the examples in this group show is that theor-translation (and a possible subsequent reanalysis in BCS with ‘ili’) sets the interpretation on the wrong track; in otherwords, odnosno has either the reformulative ‘in other words’/‘that is’ or distributive ‘and respectively’ readings.

5.3. Odnosno ‘Ø’

(20) a. jedinice i stabovi, odnosno njihove komande‘Ø the commands of a large number of units’

b. povjerenje odnosno ukazivanje povjerenja načelnika staba‘Ø a vote of confidence for the Head of Staff ’

c. gube inicijativu, odnosno ne vrsi se blagovremen taktički razvoj jedinica, planiranje aktivnih b/d‘losing the initiative,Ø the tactical development of units is not done on time nor are active combat operationsplanned on time’

(taken from excerpts (a), (f) and (j) in Appendix A)

Odnosno in (20) functions as a reformulation marker by signalling the process of ad hoc concept formation (i.e., theparticular inferential relations of set-member (20a), abstract-instance (20b) and general-specific (20c)).

The three BCS examples in this group are all instances of pragmatic strengthening whereby the communicatedconcepts (linguistically encoded in PC2), namely, NJIHOVE KOMANDE* (lit.) ‘their commands’ (20a), UKAZIVANJEPOVERENJANACELNIKA STABA* (lit.) ‘showing the confidence in the Head of the Headquarter’ (20b), and NE VRSI SEBLAGOVREMEN TAKTICKI RAZVOJ JEDINICA, PLANIRANJE AKTIVNIH B/D* (lit.) ‘not performing a regular tacticaldevelopment of units, not planning active combat operations’ (20c), further specify a potential indeterminacy of the lexicalconcepts (linguistically encoded inPC1), namely, JEDINICE I STABOVI (lit.) ‘units and headquarters’ (20a), POVERENJE(lit.) ‘confidence’ (20b) and GUBE INICIJATIVU (lit.) ‘lose an initiative’ (20c).

However, of the three examples in this group, the Ø-translation of (20c) seems to differ from the other two in terms ofwhether odnosno indeed contributes to the relevance of the host utterances. We believe that there is a fairly goodjustification in the translator's choice to leave out odnosno in (20a) and (20b), and thereby to reduce the discourse-connective relation of the BCS utterances to that of the communicatively relevant information, which is, as we have arguedfor in this paper, linguistically encoded in PC2 of odnosno-utterances.

The rationale behind the translator's option, in our view, lies in the fact that there does not seem that any particularcognitive effect might be gained, which would offset the effort expended in the interpretation of the linguistically encodedmaterial in PC2 (in relation to the linguistically encoded material in PC1), for example, by the use of the wordier (PC2)expression in (20b). The full excerpts (a) and (f) provided in Appendix A (from which (20a) and (20b) were taken) supportour point: the main relevance of excerpt (a) lies in the fact that the required reports were not regularly submitted (this is,presumably, a responsibility of top commanding officers and not of their subordinate unit and headquarter personnel);(20b), on the other hand, is relevant in the context of excerpt (f) according to which, the agenda for the meeting must haveincluded the particulars regarding the scheduled voting (i.e., the ‘‘for whom’’41 and ‘‘why’’ issues).42


40 Although, as we have said, or can be used as a reformulation marker, especially when it is immediately followed by the proper marker in otherwords. By contrast, ili odnosno ‘or in other words’ is anomalous in BCS.41 There is an orthographic mistake in excerpt (f) in Appendix A (which we copied from the original) in that the properly assigned morphologicalcase would render this BCS utterance as (ukazivanje povjerenja) načelniku and not as (ukazivanje povjerenja) načelnika. The interpretation, as itstands, would be that it is načelnik ‘the Head of Staff ’ who extends his confidence (and not the opposite), which, clearly, cannot be the case here.42 It is not surprising that the word has not been translated given the fact that many expressions which are now seen as discourse markers havetraditionally been summarily dismissed from meticulous linguistic analyses on the account that they function as mere fillers or hedges (see, forexample, Hansen, 1989; Miskovic-Lukovic and Dedaic, 2010). In contemporary research, however, discourse markers are treated as remarkablelinguistic devices that shed important light on the semantics/pragmatics interface in utterance understanding (cf. Fraser, 1990; Schourup, 1999;Miskovic-Lukovic and Dedaic, 2010). This, however, should not be taken to mean that discourse markers are never used as fillers.


By contrast, odnosno in (20c) has quite a distinctive inferential role, which we have already explained in terms of thedifference between linguistically encoded and communicated concepts. What is surprising, however, is the translator'schoice (contra the practice illustrated by (20a) and (20b)) to leave out the marker and retain the lexical conceptlinguistically encoded in PC1. The context presented in excerpt (j) in Appendix A does not lend support to such an option:the key word inicijativa ‘initiative’ is syntactically adjacent to the verb gubiti ‘lose’, which normally has a negativeconnotation (and particularly so in war-related terminology). Therefore, it is highly relevant to the interlocutor tounderstand how to interpret the vagueness of this term. The translator's choice to leave out odnosno, however, keeps itunresolved; moreover, the translation conveys an incorrect understanding, namely, that the juxtaposed constituents areseparate items in a list of activities.

5.4. Odnosno ‘i.e./that is’

(21) na nivou Opstinskog staba, odnosno brigade‘on the level of a municipal staff, that is brigade’

(taken from excerpt (s) in Appendix A)

The only two occurrences of ‘i.e.’ in our data where the meaning of odnosnowas interpreted in terms of one of the Englishreformulation markers (see Blakemore, 1997; Miskovic-Lukovic, 2006) were attested in the phrases Muslimani, odn.[odnosno] Bosnjaci ‘Muslims, i.e., Bosniaks’ and broj Muslimana, odnosno Bosnjaka ‘the number of Muslims, i.e.,Bosniaks’. We have already discussed such instances in connection with example (17). The interpretation of example (21)is, however, ambiguous: a hearer who is not informed of the particular organisation of the Muslim forces in Bosnia andHerzegovina during the given period would normally interpret the utterance in the reformulative way; to an informedhearer, the interpretation would run along the lines of the explanation for (18e) and (18f).

5.5. Odnosno ‘by means of’, ‘or rather’, ‘and so’

(22) a. da se navodi i izlozene činjenice u ovom protestu provjere, odnosno da se sprovedetemeljita istraga i preduzmu energične mere i sankcije protiv vinovnika ovog nemilog dogapaja‘that the above allegations and facts be checked by means of a thorough investigation, that vigorousmeasures be undertaken to punish the culprits’

b. konkretna taktička situacija, odnosno potrebno vreme za ubacivanje, smjene četnika na polozajima i ostaleokolnosti‘the concrete tactical situation or rather the time needed to infiltrate, for the Chetniks to rotate at theirpositions and other circumstances’

c. nemogucnost izjasnjavanja pripadnika muslimanskog naroda u značajnom dijelu ovog perioda, odnosnonjihovo ‘‘prelijevanje’’ u druge nacionalne skupine‘the Muslim people could not express their ethnicity for a considerable time during this period and so they‘‘spilled over’’ into other ethnic groups’

(taken from excerpts (c), (l) and (q) in Appendix A)

Odnosno in (22) is a proper reformulation marker. As we have already pointed out, the relevance of odnosno-utteranceslies in establishing an inferential connection between PC1 and PC2 in such a way that PC2 explicates the communicatedcontent of the linguistically encoded PC1 content (specific relations that obtain for PC1 and PC2 are context-dependent).

The three examples in this group are all instances of pragmatic strengthening in that the conceptual contents of therespective PC2 further elaborate (or specify) what the lexical concepts in PC1 refer to. In (22a) -- which illustrates aprocess-step relation -- the linguistically encoded meaning of provere ‘check’ is communicatively spelt out in the threesteps: SPROVEDE TEMELJITA ISTRAGA* (lit.) ‘conduct a thorough investigation’, PREDUZMU ENERGICNE MERE*(lit.) ‘undertake energetic measures’ and [PREDUZMU]43 SANKCIJE PROTIV VINOVNIKA OVOG NEMILOGDOGADJAJA* ‘undertake sanctions against the perpetrators of this unpleasant event’. In (22b) -- which illustrates anabstract-instance relation -- the complex concept linguistically encoded in PC1 as konkretna taktička situacija (lit.)‘particular tactical situation’ is instantiated as POTREBNO VREME ZA UBACIVANJE* (lit.) ‘required time for infiltration’,SMJENA CETNIKA* (lit.) ‘shifts of the Chetniks’ andOSTALEOKOLNOSTI* (lit.) ‘other circumstances’44. In (22c) -- which


43 This is an instance of a verbal ellipsis in BCS.44 This third instance, linguistically encoded in PC2 as ostale okolnosti ‘other circumstances’, is semantically vague and therefore in need of afurther pragmatic enrichment such as okolnosti [na terenu] ‘circumstances [of the battle field]’. In communicative terms, this lexical under-determinacy of the DP might be a result of the availability of the assumption (e.g., because it has frequently been repeated and/or it is known byperception) in the cognitive systems of the sender and recipient of this communiqué.


illustrates a general-specific relation -- the vague concept linguistically encoded in PC1 as nemogucnost izjasnjavanjapripadnika muslimanskog naroda (lit.) ‘the impossibility of coming out of members of the Muslim nation’ is strengthened tomean NJIHOVO ‘‘PRELIVANJE’’ U DRUGE NACIONALNE SKUPINE* (lit.) ‘their ‘‘pouring into’’ other ethnic groups’,which is linguistically encoded in PC2 as the speaker-intended proposition. This example is interesting in yet another way:it illustrates how a communicated meaning can further be made indeterminate (at the explicit level of communication) forreasons of political and/or ideological ‘‘correctness’’.45

The translations in (22), however, differ from the translations discussed so far in that the translator chooses to(explicitly) specify her interpretation of the relation between PC1 and PC2 by encoding it into the respective translations ofthe BCS marker odnosno, namely, ‘by means of’, ‘or rather’ and ‘and so’. These English options are not what the lexemeodnosno encodes in BCS, with the exception of or rather.46,47

So far we have analysed the meaning of odnosno in BCS, and we have related it to the genre of legal discourse byconsidering how this word affected the interpretation in war-related testimonies at the ICTY, which turned out to becontroversial. We have illustrated this controversy in the four cited quotations and examined many related problematicinstances of the use of odnosno throughout this paper.

To complement our findings from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective, we turn now to a socio-pragmatic perspective inwhich wemaintain the underlying, relevance-theoretic, approach to the meaning of odnosno (see Gutt, 1989, 1998, 1991/2000) for a relevance-theoretic account of translation) but supplement it with a discussion based on socially informedstudies on politics and ideology (see Schäffner, 1998; Van Dijk, 1998; Stahuljak, 2010).

6. Sociopragmatic implications

We have already noted that certain translations of odnosno in our data do not correspond to the prescribed equivalentsin English, but rather exhibit a looser interpretation. In this section, we will dissect those instances more closely, payingattention to the ideological underpinnings that become mutually manifest and that suddenly introduce a semantic andpragmatic conflict in the receptor's understanding of the given utterance.

We said earlier that, in producing an utterance, a speaker aims at getting across a wide array of strongly and weaklycommunicated assumptions, some of which are explicitly or implicitly communicated. In case of translation, the speaker isan acting hearer who -- by translating -- conveys the understoodmeaning of the utterance from one language into another.By doing so, she uses different linguistic material in an attempt to match the meanings in the activated cognitive context.This comparative opportunity offers an ostensive look into the selection that a translator must make in any given utterance.

Ideologically laden source utterances may have a significant influence not only on the translator's choice of anappropriate (i.e., ideologically unbiased) meaning, but also, and more importantly, on her hesitancy to explicitly commitherself to the contextually salient but, nonetheless, ‘‘undesirable’’ connotation. The result is what we call the translator'scognitive bifurcation, which is, as we have shown, evident in odnosno-utterances.

The selection is guided by the decision of the translator as to what is relevant to her, and also, what she thinks might berelevant to the recipient. As Stahuljak (2010:413) points out, ‘‘[i]nterpreters do not occupy a position of ‘elsewhere’ thatharmonizes or hybridizes contradictory and conflictual positions; rather they are very much inscribed in their specific timeand place (geographical and ideological).’’ Within the constraints of direct translation required by the court environment,the translator will have to attempt to preserve the information content of the original, that is, the assumptions that thetranslator believes that speaker of the original text intended to communicate. Those assumptions rely on explicatures andimplicatures. Thus, the most direct translation is that in which explicatures and implicatures are the same as the


45 The euphemistic wording is accomplished by two linguistic means: first, the metaphorically used --ing phrase prelivanje ‘pouring a liquidsubstance from one vessel into another’, which is additionally emphasised with the use of an imperfective form of the base ( preliti vs. prelivati), isintended to mean, roughly, ‘forced transformation’; secondly, the explicit indeterminacy of druge nacionalne skupine ‘other national [ethnic]groups’ even in the context of excerpt (q) in Appendix A, leaves open (to an uninformed reader) a possibility of a neutral interpretation (e.g.,Slovenians, Croats, Serbs and Macedonians, or more widely, any nationality of ex-Yugoslavia, or even more widely, any ethnic group which neednot necessarily be of a Slavic origin). The utterance, in fact, effectively masks an (implicit) accusation that it was Serbs (presumably to a higherdegree) and Croats (presumably to a lesser degree) who forced the Muslims to ‘‘convert’’. Otherwise, the speaker could have avoided thetransference of relevance to the implicit level of communication by inserting the determiner dve (e.g., u druge dve etničke grupe ‘in the other twoethnic groups’), which, in the context of excerpt (q), would clearly identify the relevant referent sets.46 Or rather has a reformulative function in self- and other-repair; e.g., They will arrive on Friday, the 21st, or rather on Saturday, the 21st. Undercertain circumstances, odnosno might be used as a BCS translational equivalent, e.g., ‘Stici ce u petak, 21., odnosno u subotu, 21.’ However,this invented example does not convey what odnosno procedurally constrains in the utterance of (22b).47 Another issue is whether such translations are, nonetheless, justified in terms of more general considerations such as a relevance-driveninterpretation and the economy of translation. This issue, however, lies outside the scope of our paper, but it is certainly worthwhile to pursue in amore translation-oriented, contrastive, study which would not have to deal with the issue of what the lexeme odnosno encodes.


explicatures and implicatures of the original (Gutt, 1989:80). However, the full transmission of explicatures andimplicatures is virtually impossible, given the complexity of weakly and strongly communicated explicit/implicitassumptions that an utterance is intended to convey. In the case of the Hague trial, an additional burden is that of theideological beliefs of the utterance producer, the utterance translator, and the utterance receptor, who all might or mightnot be of the same ideological persuasion.

6.1. Translation and ideology

As Sperber and Wilson (1986/95) have shown, there are two distinct ways in which representations, such asutterances or text, can be used: they can be used descriptively, as true descriptions of some states of affairs, but they canalso be used interpretatively, on the basis of resemblance with some other representations. Since translation is presentedon the basis of its resemblance with the original, it falls into the category of interpretive use (see also Gutt, 1989:81). Thequestion is, then, what aspects of the original the translator should preserve for a particular audience so that hertranslation adequately resembles the original in respects relevant to that particular audience.

Because the court context requires translation to be as direct as possible, the translator has to come up with the mostauthentic meaning that does not rely on the translator's own interpretation as to what is relevant to the audience. Further,the translator has to make accessible to the audience all information potentially derivable from the original text. However,in the ideologically dense context this is extremely difficult. This fact has been demonstrated in translations of variouslanguages (e.g., French-Arabic translation, Jacquemond, 1992; Turkish translation, Gürçaglar, 2009; ‘‘orientalisation’’ inFrench/English-Arabic translations, Al-Qinai, 2005; translation of the identical news reports from English into Chinese,Kuo and Nakamura, 2005; political speeches in German and English, Schäffner, 1998; incest-related taboos from Englishinto Turkish, Isbuga-Erel, 2008; translation of politically charged texts from English into Arabic, Daraghmeh et al., 2010;war translation and interpreting, Stahuljak, 2010, the translation of Chomsky's book Media Control into Persian, Khajehand Khanmohammad, n.d.) and discussed as a general phenomenon (Venuti, 1992; Mason, 1994; Fawcett, 1998;Tymoczko, 2003; St André, 2004; Baker, 2010).

Ideology, in the sense of being the basis of the social representations shared by the members of a group (Van Dijk,1998, 2004), interferes with the translator's professional neutrality in her pursuit of the most meaningful translation of theoriginal text.48 The fact that odnosno adds its own array of choices makes the selection even harder. The translator, (sub)consciously, considers the options relevant to many contextual features -- local and global -- in an attempt to provideoptimal relevance. In view of Gutt's instruction quoted below, we proceed to analyse the translations of the texts containingthe marker odnosno which poses a problem because of its procedural complexity, as explained in section 4.

[The translator] need not adapt the translated text to avoid misunderstandings likely to arise from contextualdifferences, because he canwork on the assumption that the translation will be interpreted with regard to the originalcontext. In fact, he should notmake such adaptations because if processed in the original context, such adaptationswould lead to differences in interpretation. Thus, the presumption of complete interpretive resemblance rules out theexplication of implicit information, summarizing and other changes in explicit content. (Italics in the original)

(Gutt, 1989:89)

6.2. ‘And’: false connection?

In terms of achieving the most direct translation of the texts containing the discourse marker odnosno, we arespecifically interested in the most disputed translation for odnosno -- the connective ‘and’. ‘And’ has been used torepresent the meaning of odnosno in most of the quoted instances (8 out of 24), as follows:

(18) !a. prevozno sredstvo odnosno gorivo‘no vehicle to use and no fuel’

!b. svi izvjestaji odnosno evidencija izbjeglih lica‘all reports and records of refugees’

!c. pravilno esaloniranje snaga, odnosno organizacija dubine odbrane‘the correct echeloning of forces and the organization of the depths of the defence’


48 Stahuljak (2010) dissects the neutrality of linguistic mediation of interpreters during the initial war years in Croatia. She points out that, ‘‘[t]ornbetween political allegiance and professionalism, interpreters literally embody the violence of the conflict that they translate for the internationalcommunity. While translating the violence of the war, they themselves become the site of a violent conflict’’ (p. 400).


!d. planirati upotrebu jedinica i grupisanje snaga shodno takvom rasporedu neprijatelja, odnosno planiratijednovremeni napad po svim elementima ovakvog b/r neprijatelja‘to plan the use of units and the grouping of forces in accordance with such a disposition of enemy forcesand to plan a simultaneous attack on all the elements of such an enemy combat disposition’

e. brigade ARBiH, odnosno OpSO‘ARBH and OpSO brigades’

f. brigade [ARBiH] odnosno OpSO‘the brigades and the OpSO’

!g. postigao moralni efekat odnosno razbilo vec usvojeno uvjerenje da o njima niko ne brine i da im niko nepomaze‘render moral support, and help dispel the deeply rooted belief that they are on their own and that noassistance will come from any quarter’

!h. ubrza sa točenjem cisterni, odnosno po jedna cisterna sa 30 tona krece iz Gruda sa svakih 10 vozila izkonvoja‘the loading of tankers be expedited and that one 30-ton tanker sets off from Grude with every convey of 10vehicles’

(taken from excerpts (d), (e), (i), (k), (m), (n), (o) and (p) in Appendix A)

In the data presented above, we will focus on the disputed instances, as indicated in section 5. Those instances are a,b, c, d, g and h (marked by arrows). We are interested in seeing whether the translation is truly direct, as outlined at thebeginning of this section; that is, whether the relevance is achieved by conveying the original explicatures andimplicatures.

Example (18a) has been said to convey a metonymy (vehicle! fuel), and this kind of transfer is considered to be atype of reformulation (Blakemore, 1997, 2007; Wilson and Carston, 2006, 2007). Why would, then, such a proceduralmeaning be equated with the English connective ‘and’ in the given context? There are three ways to understand the text‘‘ovaj stab nije imao prevoznog sredstva odnosno goriva’’: (1) the Staff had neither a vehicle nor fuel, (2) the Staff did nothave a vehicle, but even if it had a vehicle, it would be worthless because there was no fuel, and (3), the Staff had a vehiclebut since there was no fuel, the vehicle was unusable (it was as if they did not have it). To untangle these options into amost neutral translation, the translator chose option (1) presumably because the other two are more speculative.However, the connective ‘and’ implies parallel constituents, which is not contained in the set of assumptionscommunicated by the original.

Examples (18b) and (18h) are even further away from the presentation of equal constituents. In (18b) a vague conceptREPORTS is elaborated by précising as to what kind of reports these are (RECORDSOFREFUGEES), and therefore thetranslation is violating the set of explicatures from the original. A similar example is (18h) where the constituent followingthemarker makes it explicit how the loading of the tankers would proceed. Both examples are sort of reformulations wherethe concepts are given more details in order to make them clearer.

Clarity is the reason for the elaboration (which is a form of reformulation) in (18c) and (18d), as in these texts theconcepts aremademore transparent because of the non-transparency of themilitary terminology (ECHELONING ! THEORGANIZATION OF THE DEPTHS OF DEFENCE) or a resolution of inferences from the previously given concept(PLAN THE USE OF UNITS . . .! PLAN A SIMULTANEOUS ATTACK. . .). In example (18g), we see the case ofelaboration of the concept MORAL EFFECT, which gives an explicature for the set of potentially unwanted inferences.

The translators may have been familiar with the general context of the produced original texts, although they might nothave known details of the local context in which the text was produced, which then guided them to opt for the most neutral,albeit sometimes not the most direct, translation.

In addition, we suggested earlier that the dispute exemplified in (15) was triggered by the English translation ofodnosno in (15a). It was argued by the defence team that the crucial word and was omitted in the translation and that thecorrect rendering of the original should, in fact, be (15b).

(15) a. There have been some cases of members of the 7th Muslim Mujahedin Brigade being mistreated.b. There have been some cases of the 7th Muslim Brigade and the Mujahedin being mistreated.

In other words, leaving out the connective meaning of odnosno (either by not translating it at all (Ø) or by implying itsreformulatory meaning ‘in other words’ and ‘meaning’) resulted in equating the concepts of MUSLIM and MUJAHEDIN.The BCS connective i (‘and’) is quite frequently used in all the registers; it is, therefore, unlikely that a speaker wouldreplace it by using odnosno. We question the cognitive and pragmatic bases for this interpretation, and believe that thereasons must be the translator's, as well as the audience's, ideological convictions. The resolution of the meaning of the



original text that produced translations in (15) could lie in (original) speaker's own hesitation to claim the knowledge of whothemistreated people really were, that is, whether they weremembers of the 7thMuslim Brigade or theMujahedin. It couldalso be his or her ideological conviction that the members of this brigade are actually the Mujahedin. We cannot know this,and neither could the translator; she went for the most neutral rendition of the original, which is seemingly unacceptable toboth opposing ideologies.

The distributive meaning of odnosno, which would -- in English -- be best represented as ‘X and Y, respectively’requires a different procedural effort on the part of the recipient than the one discussed thus far. Since an and-utteranceachieves relevance beyond and above the separate conjuncts, the relevance of an odnosno-utterance (in terms of aconnective and not discourse marker) is to suspend the relevance of the and-conjunction by indicating that the twoconjuncts are both separately relevant. When the translator, in cases of the distributive meaning of odnosno, reduces hertranslation to ‘and’ (omitting the distributive part ‘respectively’), she effectively produces a new text with disputablemeaning.

6.3. ‘Or’: distributive function of odnosno

The disjunctive ‘or’ foregrounds the distributive function of the marker odnosno. Of the four translations in our data(reproduced below), two (19b-c) might not be disputable:

(19) !a. mir, odnosno mirno rjesavanje nastalih sukoba‘peace or a peaceful solution of the present conflicts’

b. povjerenik odnosno član staba za naselje Vakuf‘commissioner or member of the Vakuf Staff’

c. odbrana, odnosno napad‘defence or attack’

!d. zivi, odnosno ima pravo da se vrati‘live or have the right to return’

(taken from excerpts (b), (g), (h) and (r) in Appendix A)

On several occasions wementioned the ‘‘appropriateness’’ of a reading. Besides the dictionary knowledge of the givenlanguages, the translator has to make a choice as to what is the closest figurative, ideological, contextual, or othermeaning in the target language to the one in the source language. This choice depends foremost on the understanding ofthe source, which is in this case burdened by a mountain of ideological sediment. This is best seen in sentences that carrydirect references to ethnic, religious and national groups or their struggles, negotiations, accusations and assignments ofguilt. In that respect, the cases that are ideologically or politically more delicate are emphasized below:

(19) a. mir, odnosno mirno rjesavanje nastalih sukoba‘peace or a peaceful solution of the present conflicts’

d. To znači da u RS zivi, odnosno ima pravo da se vrati. . .‘This means that [. . .] live in RS or have the right to return there. . .’

We have already considered the disjunction ‘or’ in (19a) and (19d), which effectively masks the reformulation marker.Because of the possibility of misinterpretation of the contents of the lexical concepts PEACE and LIVE (‘live as aninhabitant of a given area’), the translator downplays the linguistically encoded meanings in PC1 so that the commu-nicated meanings in PC2 are linguistically rendered in a politically correct, euphemistic, manner. However, thedisjunctive interpretation precludes the reading that ‘peace’ can be interpreted as ‘peaceful solution of the presentconflicts’.

(19d) is semantically and pragmatically multi-layered, including the partly overlapping semantic fields of the word zivi(3rd Sg.) which means ‘lives’ in two different ways: ‘live’ as in the expression related to life and death ‘I hope you live long’,vs. the meaning related to habitation, such as the expression ‘she lives on the third floor’. The latter meaning is related toplace, but then again it may have two further distinct nuances: ‘‘to live somewhere’’ may mean ‘‘to have an addresssomewhere’’ and it may mean ‘‘to possess a dwelling somewhere’’.

The utterance ‘[t]his means that [number of Bosniaks, Croats, Yugoslavs and others] live in RS, or have the right toreturn there’ conveys the following: there is a number of people from these groups that already live there and there aresome who do not live there but have a property or address there and thus assume the right to return. The communicatedconcept gives, besides the cited, also the following reading: ‘This means that [number of B, C, Y and others] live in RS andhave the right to return there.



Although the width of the pragmatic and semantic fields of odnosno is contextually defined, it is occasionallymultifaceted. Since the translator has to produce a direct translation of the original text, she is pressed to chooseone of the meanings, most likely the one closest to her own understanding of odnosno. As a human with herown national and ethnic identity and the accompanying beliefs, the translator reflects her ideological identity inrelation to the text. This identity forms a translator's cognitive context through which meanings are processed andreproduced into another language (see also Al-Mohannadi, 2008). The communicated content introduces atranslator-originated set of implicatures and explicatures, and therefore fails to meet the requirement for the directtranslation.

6.4. ‘Ø’ translation: repair or mess-up?

Examples in which odnosno is translated as ‘Ø’ are specific because they indicate that the translator understoododnosno as a repair-indicating marker, and opted to render the translation by omitting the error that was supposedlyrepaired. Such examples are quoted in (20), repeated below, with the original Tribunal translation in the second and ourtranslation in the third line:

(20) !a. jedinice i stabovi, odnosno njihove komande‘the commands of a large number of units’‘units and headquarters, that is/or more precisely, their commands’

!b. o daljnjem povjerenju odnosno ukazivanje povjerenja načelnika staba‘a vote of confidence for the Head of Staff’‘further trust, that is/I mean, show a vote of confidence for the Head of Staff ’

!c. gube inicijativu, odnosno ne vrsi se blagovremen taktički razvoj jedinica, planiranje aktivnih b/d‘losing the initiative, the tactical development of units is not done on time nor are active combat operationsplanned on time’‘losing the initiative, that means/more precisely/in other words, the tactical development of units is notdone on time, nor active combat operations planned timely’(taken from excerpts (a), (f) and (j) in Appendix A)

(20a) and (20b) are clear examples of repair in which semantic narrowing is occurring prefaced by odnosno. Example(20c), however, is a typical reformulation in which the preceding constituent is explained in more detail. The reason for theinterpretation in the original translation is the translator's understanding of the relationship between the two constituentsthat is taken to be insignificant for the understanding of the utterance.

We see that rendering odnosnowith Ø factually means that anymeaning that odnosnomight contribute to the cognitiveand social aspects of interpretation is being neglected or dismissed. Occasionally, the dismissal can be approved by thelogic of economy as the translator avoids spending time on translating a repair. Such is example (20a), where ametonymic transfer has been replaced by the denotative meaning. The listener was afforded a faster processing of themeaning as the more general lexical component (‘units and headquarters’) was replaced by the more precise one(‘commands of units’).

7. Winding up

Table 2 summarizes a configuration of the semantic and pragmatic roles of the linguistic form odnosno in relevance-theoretic terms (Carston, 2002):


Table 2Semantic and pragmatic roles of odnosno.

Linguistic formodnosno

Type of meaning(linguistic semantics)

Type of meaning(TC semantics)

Pragmatic contribution

Preposition Conceptual Non-truth-conditional Higher-level explicatureConnective Conceptual Truth-conditional Proposition expressedDiscourse marker Procedural Non-truth-conditional Higher-level explicature

Proposition expressed


This paper was not envisaged as a diachronic study of the word odnosno, and for this reason we have left out the issueof the relation between the conceptual meanings of the preposition and the connective, and focused, instead, on theprocedural meaning of the discourse marker. We assume that the dominant, contemporary use of the discourse marker isa result of the process of grammaticalisation typical of many pragmatic markers, such as decategorialisation, divergence,desemanticisation and subjectification (except for parentheticalisation) (see, for example, Traugott, 1997; Schwenter andTraugott, 2000; Brinton, 2001). Along came the weakening of at least one of the conceptual meanings, in this case theprepositional, which is hardly in use anymore.

We follow Blakemore's (1996, 1997) general discussion and explanation of the relevance of reformulation in terms ofinterpretive resemblance and inferential relations between two propositions (or propositional constituents). However,there is nothing in our data that would parallel -- and therefore lend support to -- a conceptual treatment which is argued forthe corresponding English reformulation markers that is and in other words. According to the data from the trial scripts,which, anyhow, do not depart in any significant way from the use of the discourse marker in ordinary communication,odnosno semantically constrains what is explicitly communicated.Odnosno signals to the hearer thatPC2 is the speaker'sinterpretation of PC1 (i.e., the interpretive relation is established between the two segments) and that PC2 is acommunicated concept based on the linguistically encoded concept in PC1. This means that an odnosno-utterancealways carries an assumption of a strongly communicated explicature.

The explicature is two-pronged and therefore depends crucially on both the co-text and global context. In the case ofthe ICTY translations, we see that ideological and institutional settings determine the constraints that are taken intoaccount in the calculation of meaning. We identify two distinct cognitive/pragmatic meanings: reformulatory anddistributive.

The translators’ choice of translating odnosno with ‘and’ seems to diverge from these two pragmatic meanings, andtherefore represents an issue that we consider to be either the matter of a translator's error or otherwise a choiceconstrained by her understanding of the ideological reality or beliefs about what reality should be. The reasons for suchtranslations might be related to their contextual sensitivity, as the topics invoke delicate national issues at the time ofwar. Such translations expressly indicate translators’ hesitation and care to convey the most neutral form of meaning,since the translation is not only politically sensitive, but also legally obliging. Therefore, by choosing what to thetranslator looks like the most neutral rendering of the odnosno-utterance, she effectively strengthens the clarity of theexpression or she weakens potential ideological edges in order to obstruct the ideological categoricalness. Makingsuch utterances vaguer might also deflect the responsibility of the translator for the words of ‘‘the other’’. In other words,the translator shies away from attributing to the utterance any ‘‘uncertain’’ meanings that could be, but are notnecessarily, pragmatically embedded in the original utterance. However, perfect ideological correctness is anunattainable goal, and the trail travails of the translators at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslaviaare well exemplified in their struggle through the maze of explicated and inferred meanings of odnosno-utterances invarious contexts.

Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to two anonymous reviewers for this journal for their meticulous comments on earlier drafts ofthis article. We extend our gratitude to Jonathan Culpeper for his support and encouragement. Our special thanks go toMaryPat Begin for her editing assistance.

Appendix A

(a) Analizom prispjelih izvjestaja u posljednje vrijeme uočeno je da veliki broj jedinica i stabova, odnosnonjihove komande ne ispunjavaju obavezu, tj. ne dostavljaju nam redovno ove izvjestaje.‘An analysis of recently received reports showed that the Ø commands of a large number of units did notcomply with this obligation and failed to submit such reports regularly.’

(Exhibit P318)(b) Koliko je HVO-u zaista stalo do mira, odnosno do mirnog rjesavanja nastalih sukoba, najbolje govori danasnje

granatiranje uzeg gradskog područja.‘The shelling of Zenica town centre today goes to show just how much the HVO wants to have peace, or apeaceful solution of the present conflicts.’

(Exhibit DH1177)(c) Od svih imperativno zahtijevamo da se navodi i izlozene činjenice u ovom protestu provjere, odnosno da se

sprovede temeljita istraga i preduzmu energične mjere i sankcije protiv vinovnika ovog nemilog dogapaja, a osvemu preduzetom da se izvjesti Komanda 3. Korpusa.



‘We strongly demand that the above allegations and facts be checked by means of a thorough investigation,that vigorousmeasures be undertaken to punish the culprits, and that the 3rdCorps Command be duly informedabout them.’

(Exhibit DH1046)(d) Ovaj stab nije imao prevoznog sredstva odnosno goriva pa su se poslovi i ako u ovim teskim uslovima obavljali

sa uspjehom.‘The Staff had no vehicle to use and no fuel, despite which it was successful in carrying out its tasks in thesedifficult conditions.’

(Exhibit DH1283)(e) Dalje navodi da svi izvjestaji odnosno evidencija izbjeglih lica mora biti potpuno azurna i posebno tačna sa

svim podacima koji su potrebni i koji se traze.‘Sehic went on to say that all reports and records of refugees must be fully updated and particularly accurate,including all necessary information and information that has been requested.’

(Exhibit DH1283)(f) Sehic Besim pod ovom tačkom navodi da bi se ovom prilikom u prvom redu trebalo diskutovati o daljnjem

povjerenju odnosno ukazivanja povjerenja načelnika staba, jer za ovo radno mjesto potrebna je visa stručnasprema.‘Under this item, Besim Sehic said that this occasion should, first and foremost, be used to discuss Ø a vote ofconfidence for the Head of Staff, as the post requires two-year post-secondary school qualifications.’

(Exhibit DH1283)(g) Dalje navodi da Zuparevic Ibrahim ne radi nista kao povjerenik odnosno član staba za naselje Vakuf, pa

predlaze umjesto njega da se imenuje Grabus Fahra.‘He went on to state that Ibrahim Zuparevic has done nothing in his capacity as commissioner ormember of theVakuf Staff and proposed that Fahra Grabus be appointed as his replacement.’

(Exhibit DH1283)(h) Naime, kod grupacija snaga nije se pridavao značaj objedinjavanju jedinica i formacija kao i snaga na pojedinim

pravcima odbrane, odnosno napada, te se često puta islo na dovopenje različitih sitnih jedinica utapanjemjedinica u jedinice bez pretpočinjavanja, tako da je dolazilo do mjesanja nadleznosti i odgovornosti ujedinstvenim zonama dejstva.‘When the forces were grouped, no importance was given to the merging of units, formations and forces alongcertain lines of defence or attack: very often various small units were brought in and incorporated into otherunits without resubordination so that there was interference in jurisdiction and responsibility in join zones ofoperation.’

(Exhibit P6921)(i) Cesto puta duzina linije dodira sa četnicima i shvatanje starjesina i boraca da prva linija rovova mora biti

popunjena kako to oni misle ‘‘falange’’ je opterecivalo i pravilno esaloniranje snaga, odnosno organizacijadubine odbrane, a i njihova upotreba je bila neracionalna.‘Very often, the length of the line of contact with the Chetniks and the views of officers and fighters that the firstline of trenches must be manned to the full, as they thought, in a phalanx, also burdened the correct echeloningof forces and the organization of the depths of the defence.’

(Exhibit P6921)(j) Ova slabost ima za posledicu da nase snage gube inicijativu, odnosno ne vrsi se blagovremen taktički razvoj

jedinica, planiranje aktivnih b/d, te gubimo sansu za nametanje vlastitih oblika izvopenja oruzane borbe, i b/dkao jedno od osnovnih principa ratne vjestine.‘The consequence of this weakness is that our forces are losing the initiative,Ø the tactical development of unitsis not done on time nor are active combat operations planned on time. In this way, we miss the opportunity toimpose our own forms of the armed struggle and combat operations as one of the main principles of the wardoctrine.’

(Exhibit P6921)(k) Potrebno je planirati upotrebu jedinica i grupisanje snaga shodno takvom rasporedu neprijatelja, odnosno

planirati jednovremeni napad po svim elementima ovakvog b/r neprijatelja.‘It is necessary to plan the use of units and the grouping of forces in accordance with such a disposition ofenemy forces and to plan a simultaneous attack on all the elements of such an enemy combat disposition.’

(Exhibit P6921)(l) Početak izvopenja b/d treba biti bez artiljerijske pripreme, a vrijeme gotovosti i početak dejstava uskladiti sa

konkretnom taktičkom situacijom, odnosno potrebnim vremenom za ubacivanje, smjene četnika napolozajima i ostalim okolnostima.



‘The execution of combat operations should start without any artillery preparations, while the time of combatreadiness and the commencement of the operation should be adjusted in view of the concrete tactical situation orrather the time needed to infiltrate, for the Chetniks to rotate at their positions and other circumstances.’

(Exhibit P6921)(m) Pretpočinjavanje na vojnim zadacima maksimalno izvrsiti do 2/3 ljudstva, čime 1/3 ljudstva ce svakako vrsiti

policijske poslove i praviti smjenu za 2/3 ljudstva angazovanom na datim zadacima brigade ARBiH, odnosnoOpSO kojima se pretpočinjavaju navedene policijske stanice.‘The resubordination in military tasks is to be carried out to a maximum of 2/3 of personnel, while 1/3 ofpersonnel is to carry out daily police activities and relieve the 2/3 of personnel engaged in the tasks of ARBHand OpSO brigades, to which the said police stations are to be resubordinated.’

(Exhibit DH1314)(n) Pretpočinjavanje navedenih policijskih stanica navedenim brigadama ARBiH i OpSO traje do prestanka

borbenih dejstava u zonama odgovornosti brigade odnosno OpSO na teritoriji Opstine Travnik čime prestajeda vazi ova naredba.‘The resubordination of the above-mentioned police stations to the above-mentioned brigades of ARBH andOpSO shall last until the cessation of combat activities in the areas of responsibility of the brigades and theOpSO in the territory of Travnik Municipality, at which point this order shall no longer be in effect.’

(Exhibit DH1314)(o) Razmotriti mogucnost upucivanja jedne jedinice u zonu odgovornosti 4. K čime bi se pored praktične podrske

postigao i moralni efekat odnosno razbilo vec usvojeno uvjerenje da o njima niko ne brine i da im niko nepomaze.‘Consider the option of dispatching a unit to the area of responsibility of the 4th Corps, which would render notonly practical but moral support, and help dispel the deeply rooted belief that they are on their own and that noassistance will come from any quarter.’

(Exhibit DH1494)(p) Da se ubrza sa točenjem cisterni, odnosno da po jedna cisterna sa 30 tona krece iz Gruda sa svakih 10 vozila

iz konvoja.‘That the loading of tankers be expedited and that one 30-ton tanker sets off fromGrudewith every convoy of 10vehicles.’

(Exhibit DH1543)(q) Prema raspolozivim podacima, vodeci računa o pomenutim ograničenjima, učesce Muslimana, odnosno

Bosnjaka kretalo se od 25,69% (1961.), da bi vec 1971. poraslo na 39,57% [. . .] Učesce pravoslavaca,odnosnoSrba kretalo se od 44,40% sto je zabiljezeno popisom iz 1953, do 31,37%prema poslednjempopisu[. . .] Katolici, odnosno Hrvati, učestvovali su u strukturi stanovnistva izmepu 24% (1921.) i 17,32% (1991.)[. . .] Broj Muslimana, odnosno Bosnjaka povecao se u periodu za 141,73%, Hrvata za 23,03% i Srba za20,52%. Naravno, u interpretaciji ovih podataka treba imati u vidu nemogucnost izjasnjavanja pripadnikamuslimanskog naroda u značajnom dijelu ovog perioda, odnosno njihovo ‘‘prelijevanje’’ u drugenacionalne skupine.‘According to available information and bearing in mind the aforementioned limitations, the percentage ofMuslims, or Bosniaks, increased from 25.69% in 1961 to 39.75% in 1971 [. . .] The percentage of Orthodox,or Serbs, decreased from 44.40% in 1953 to 31.73% according to the latest census [. . .] Catholics, orCroats, accounted for between 24% (in 1921) and 17.32% (in 1991) of the population of BH [. . .] During thisperiod, the number of Muslims, i.e., Bosniaks, increased by 141.73%, Croats by 23.03% and Serbs by20.52%. Of course, in interpreting these figures, it should be remembered that the Muslim people could notexpress their ethnicity for a considerable time during this period and so they ‘‘spilled over’’ into other ethnicgroups.’

(Exhibit DH2048)(r) To znači da u RS zivi, odnosno ima pravo da se vrati: 450.382 Bosnjaka, 149.763 Hravata, 75.839

Jugoslovena i 40.330 ostalih, sto ukupno iznosi 716.314 stanovnika ili 44,96% ukupnog stanovnistva togentiteta.‘Thismeans that 450,382 Bosniaks, 149,763Croats, 75,839 Yugoslavs and 40,330 others live in RS /RepublikaSrpska/, or have the right to return there, a total of 716,324 inhabitants, or 44.96% of the overall population ofthis entity.’

(Exhibit DH2048)(s) Radi izvrsenja tačke 1. ove Naredbe imenovati po jednog člana na nivou Opstinskog staba, odnosno brigade

koji ce trazene podatke dostavljati i ostvarivati saradnju sa Komisijom za brigu o ratnim zarobljenicima ievakuaciji tijela poginulih pri 3. Korpusu.



‘In order to carry out the order from Paragraph 1 of this Order, appoint one member on the level of a municipalstaff, that is brigade, who will provide such data and establish cooperation with the Commission for taking careof the war prisoners and evacuation of the bodies within 3rd Corps.’

(Exhibit DH2063)

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MirjanaMiskovic-Lukovic (Ph.D., University of Belgrade) is an associate professor of English Linguistics at the University of Kragujevac, Serbia.Working primarily within the cognitive framework provided by Relevance Theory, her main research interest lies in semantics and pragmatics ofdiscourse connectives and particles. She has published in journals and proceedings such as Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics, Srpski jezik,Filoloski pregled, Cognition in Language Use (IPrA) and Interaction and Cognition in Linguistics (Peter Lange). Her books include Semantika ipragmatika iskaza: markeri diskursa u engleskom jeziku [Semantics and pragmatics of utterances: English discourse markers] (2006, Faculty ofPhilology, Belgrade) and South Slavic Discourse Particles (co-edited with Mirjana N. Dedaic, 2010, John Benjamins).

Mirjana N. Dedaic (Ph.D., Georgetown University) is a critically oriented socio-cognitive linguist. Her research interests are interdisciplinary,applying pragmatics, critical theory, discursive psychology and critical discourse analysis on topics concerning identity construction, gender andpolitics. She has taught at several universities in the United States (Georgetown University, Fairfield University) and Croatia (University of Split,Dubrovnik International University) and published in leading linguistic journals. Her books include At War with Words (co-edited with Daniel N.Nelson, 2003, Mouton de Gruyter) and South Slavic Discourse Particles (co-edited with Mirjana Miskovic-Lukovic, 2010, Benjamins). Personalwebpage: www.dedaic.net.


The discourse marker odnosno at the ICTY: A case of disputed translation in war crime trials

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