10th U6+ Consortium of African Universities International Conference

In Africa’s multilingual landscape, the quality, availability, and institutional commitment to translated legal and policy texts are pivotal to access justice and inclusive governance. This article examines how inadequate, inaccurate, and institutionally neglected translation of legal instruments, policy documents, and governance frameworks across the Anglophone–Francophone divide in West Africa creates systemic barriers to regional integration, equitable participation, and the rule of law. Focusing particularly on cross-border contexts between Nigeria and neighbouring states—Benin, Niger, and Cameroon—the study shows how translation failures contribute to legal fragmentation and uneven civic engagement. Drawing on Translation Studies, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Legal Linguistics, the article analyses a corpus of mistranslated legal documents, ECOWAS treaty instruments, and cross-border policy materials to identify recurrent patterns of terminological distortion, procedural omission, register failure, and conceptual non-equivalence. Semi-structured interviews with legal practitioners, policymakers, and civil society representatives further illuminate the lived consequences of these failures: citizens unable to exercise rights they cannot read; cross-border legal disputes that remain unresolved due to terminological incompatibility; and development programmes that fail to effectively reach Francophone beneficiaries. The article also advances translation justice as both an analytical and normative framework, arguing that linguistically equitable governance is a prerequisite for meaningful regional integration. It proposes a five-pillar Translation Justice Framework for Inclusive African Governance (TJFIAG) as a structural response, positioning language technology, professional standards, and community participation as mutually reinforcing instruments for more effective multilingual governance architecture. Finally, the study contributes to the broader 5IR innovation agenda and to ongoing debates on inclusive, resilient higher education and governance across sub-Saharan Africa.