Abstract
Based on socio-legal fieldwork conducted in the Central African Republic in 2025, this paper examines legal language as a site of epistemic violence and decolonial critique within contemporary human rights and justice interventions. The paper contributes to critical analyses of human rights initiatives through a socio-legal and linguistic approach. The article analyses how French operates as the dominant juridical language in justice and human rights institutions. Although French is the official language of law, judicial actors routinely rely on Sango, yet no institutional framework exists for legal translation or linguistic mediation. The empirical material combines interviews with legal practitioners and a double-blind translation experiment. The translated corpus includes a fictionalized litigant testimony and excerpts from a justice perception survey. The protocol involved two independent translations from French into Sango and two independent retranslations into French. Comparative analysis shows systematic semantic and normative shifts affecting notions of injustice, legal institutions, responsibility, and categories of grievances. These shifts expose zones of legal untranslatability, where key juridical concepts lack functional equivalents in the target language. Rather than technical shortcomings, these zones reveal competing legal ontologies and the normative pressure exerted by dominant frameworks, which require local languages to adapt or import concepts under constraint. The paper argues that this process marginalizes local worldviews and generates epistemic misrecognition, illustrating how legal policies may reproduce exclusion through the very languages intended to enable justice and recognition.
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Notes
Judicial actor, Bimbo, November 2025. Translation by the author: “There are words in Sango that can aggravate the facts, while the same word in French may attenuate them. As magistrates, we have to be extremely attentive to questions of language; it is a very important part of our work”.
PK12 refers to a checkpoint located approximately 12 km from Bangui along the main northern exit road, commonly perceived as marking the boundary of effective state control.
The translators involved in the experiment had heterogeneous professional and social backgrounds. They included the manager of a local NGO working in partnership with international development and human rights institutions, a socio-anthropologist contributing to justice perception studies, a lawyer with experience in access to justice programmes in rural areas, and a law student. The group included both younger and older participants, reflecting generational diversity. No female translators were included in the protocol, which constitutes a limitation of the study. The protocol and the aims of the study were clearly explained to the participants in advance. The experiment was conducted over the course of a full day, and participants received financial compensation.
Judicial actor, Bangui, November 2025. Translation by the author: “A judge will say, ‘This forest belongs to the state.’ But what about the person standing before the court who has always known that this forest belonged to his family, that his father left it to him, and so on… how can he possibly understand what the judge is telling him?”.
Local chief, Begoua, November 2025. Translation by the author: “A problem is a problem. It’s like a fire. A small fire breaks out right there, next to a forest. If you don’t put it out quickly, that small fire could destroy the entire forest.”
Judicial actor, Bambari, November 2025. Translation by the author: “Imagine a theft case. If it is for 20,000 or 50,000 francs (approximately 30–80 USD), are we going to send someone to prison for that? With all the prison overcrowding?”.
Judicial actor, Bangui, November 2025. Translation by the author: “Take the word escroquerie. In Sango, there is no original word; people say escro-kéri. They associate it with escroc, without realising the legal specificity of the term escroquerie. When a case is legally qualified as escroquerie in court, this can create considerable misunderstanding.”
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to warmly thank Alain Serge Magbé, Simplice Passi Beassoum, Prince Judicael Sendé, Benjanski Senekian, and more broadly the organisation Echelle, for their participation in the translation protocol conducted for this study. Their linguistic work, reflections, and engagement substantially contributed to the generation of the empirical material on which this article is based. The author is deeply grateful for their trust and willingness to engage in this exploratory and experimental initiative, and hopes that this first collaboration may contribute to opening further collective reflections and collaborations between us. The author also wishes to thank the organisations Inanga and Avocats Sans Frontières for facilitating the implementation of the translation activity.
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Moriceau, J. Can Human Rights speak Sango? Legal Translation, Recognition and Epistemic Power in the Postcolonial Central African Republic. Int J Semiot Law (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-026-10508-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-026-10508-8