Comparative Analysis of Administrative French in Francophone African States and its Impact on Translation Practice

Kpoka Messanh Isaac

doi:10.56201/jpaswr.v8.no2.2023.pg149.163

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Comparative Analysis of Administrative French in Francophone African States and its Impact on Translation Practice

Kpoka Messanh Isaac

Abstract

Administrative French, the institutional register used by the bureaucracies of Francophone African states, presents a paradox that this study examines. On the surface it preserves the lexical and stylistic conventions inherited from the metropolitan French legal and administrative tradition; in practice it has diverged across national jurisdictions through decades of local appropriation, contact with indigenous and other colonial languages, and the pressures of independent state formation. This paper offers a comparative analysis of administrative French across several West and Central African states and assesses the consequences of its variation for translation practice. Drawing on sociolinguistic scholarship on the French of Africa and on postcolonial translation theory, the analysis compares the register along four dimensions: terminological localization, morphosyntactic and stylistic variation, the influence of institutional multilingualism, and the tension between an exogenous prescriptive norm and emergent endogenous norms. The findings indicate that the assumption of a single, stable French source text is untenable for administrative documents produced on the continent, and that this instability generates recurrent problems of terminological non-equivalence, uncertain legal validity, and inconsistent register for practitioners working into and out of French. The paper argues that translation involving administrative French in African contexts is better modeled as intercultural and partly intralingual mediation than as transfer between two fixed standards. It proposes implications for terminology management, translator training, and the standardization of certified translation. Beyond terminology, the paper situates administrative translation as an act of cross- cultural communication, as an operation conducted within a cross-jurisdictional compliance environment, and as a link in the verification of official records. The discussion is relevant to language policy, professional practice, and the design of terminological resources for the Francophone African public sector.

Keywords

administrative French; Francophone Africa; language variation; translation practice; terminology management; postcolonial translation; language policy

References

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Comparative Analysis of Administrative French in Francophone African States and its Impact on Translation Practice

Abstract

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