TRADUCTION JURIDIQUE ET EXIGENCES LINGUISTIQUES: TENTATIF DE TRADUCTION EN FRANÇAIS DE WOMEN AND THE RIGHT TO INHERITANCE IN NIGERIA

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Department of Arts

A legal translation is rarely undertaken as a study topic in the Department of French of the Faculty of Arts of most universities among the Anglophone communities. Women and the Right to Inheritance in Nigeria is a legal text compiled by Shelter Rights Initiative (SRI). It is a compilation of four different paper presentations, commentaries made, questions asked, answers given, recommendations made and resolutions taken on the Day of Action for the Inheritance Rights of Women in Nigeria. The Day of Action for the Inheritance Rights of Women is viewed as a long term campaign to bring national, regional and international attention to the customary inheritance practices that deny women of equal right to inherit land and property as men. It took place in the conference room of SRI on 31st July, 2001. Of the 54-page text only four presentations were translated out of which some extracts were utilized for this study. Problem of study is to ascertain whether there are constraints arising from the translation to French of Women and the Right to Inheritance in Nigeria. The objective of the study is to determine the factors that intervene in the translation of the legal text, and analysis of the situations that arose in the course of translation from English to French. The methods of analysis utilized include linguistic, socio-cultural, interpretative and functional approaches. The findings of the study confirm that indeed various problems arose on six levels considered; professional, technical, stylistic, linguistic, semantic and socio-cultural levels. The study recommends that there should be a shift in translation studies in the various Nigerian universities to accommodate other disciplines than literary studies because every discipline is translatable. Translation as well as interpretation studies should be enhanced in our national universities through exchange programme of students of not just schools of translation but equally those of interpretation. The study further encourages more Nigerians to take up interpretation in conferences especially in the ECOWAS sub-region and the world at large. The study is limited to constraints militating against the translation of Women and the Right to Inheritance in Nigeria as Les femmes et le droit de succession au Nigéria from English to French