Translating Legal Terms between French and Arabic: Algerian Legal Documents as a Case Study

Abstract

This article examines French–Arabic legal terminology in Algerian legislation and administrative adjudication, where two legal languages operate within one jurisdiction yet do not always segment legal meaning identically. It asks how translators can preserve legal effect, institutional identity, and genre convention when lexical correspondence is incomplete or misleading. The study adopts a qualitative, corpus-assisted comparative design. The dataset comprises 32 recurrent terms and phraseological units sampled purposively from Algeria’s Code of Civil and Administrative Procedure, the General Statute of the Civil Service, and an anonymised administrative judgment template. Each unit was aligned with the official French version or translated against official French statutory usage, then coded for equivalence type, translation procedure, institutional anchoring, phraseological fit, and legal-risk level. The analysis identifies three principal patterns: stable institutional equivalents, context-dependent functional equivalents, and partially incongruent concepts requiring explicitation or retention. Examples such as محافظ الدولة/commissaire d’État, عزل/révocation, الطلبات الكتابية/conclusions écrites, and دعوى الحال/la présente action show that legal adequacy depends less on dictionary substitution than on triangulation among statutory definitions, procedural function, collocation, and document genre. The findings also reveal that formulaic judicial language often demands transposition and conventional reformulation rather than literal transfer. The article proposes a four-stage workflow—legal identification, comparative conceptual analysis, phraseological validation, and documentary quality control—and argues that official parallel texts should be treated as primary evidence, not as automatically infallible equivalents. The study contributes an Algeria-specific account of jurilinguistic equivalence and offers a reproducible framework for translators, revisers, and translator educators.