Living outside the law. Translation, language and the law in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Abstract

Language can be said to interact with the law in two ways: as legal language and as language of the law. Legal language refers to legalese or the specialized sublanguage used by legal professionals such as lawyers and judges (Sarscevic, 2007). On the other hand, language of the law refers to the natural language-culture of the jurisdiction (the sum of all idiolects of a language community). Both legal language and language of the law are system-specific (Legrand, Sarcevic, 2007, De Groot and van Lair, 2006; Tiesma, 1999, Gemar, 1995). Legal language is a subset of the language of the law. While native language speakers know the language of the law (French for the French civil law and English for the English common law), they resort to the services of lawyers in order to understand legal language. This paper theorizes that in jurisdictions where the native language is both legal language and language of the law, citizens are generally more “law-conscious” and therefore more law-abiding. Conversely, in jurisdictions such as pertains in Africa where a foreign language is both the legal language and language of the law (and where majority of people do not know the foreign language), citizens are generally law-unconscious and tend to live outside the law. The former generally correlates with orderly, stable, secure, accountable and prosperous societies while the latter generally correlates with widespread lawlessness, impunity, instability, insecurity and underdevelopment. There is an incentive for translating the law into native/indigenous African languages. However, translating the law into all Ghanaian/African languages is a very expensive venture. The author looks to the EU for the balance between “universal translation” (Koskinen, 2000) and “selective translation” (Koskinen, 2000) of the law.