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<p>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.</p>

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Can Human Rights speak Sango? Legal Translation, Recognition and Epistemic Power in the Postcolonial Central African Republic

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年6月3日

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  • Julien Moriceau

摘要

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.