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