Lost in translation: Justice and rights in South Africa’s many languages

This introductory article provides an overview of the special issue on how language influences conceptions of justice and rights in South Africa. Foregrounding indigenous languages reveals the limitations of English legal concepts, including cultural differences, semantic issues of translation, and the continuities of colonial legacies. Accordingly, our threefold objectives in producing this special issue were: firstly, to explore the dissonance between liberal-constitutional notions of justice and indigenous understandings rooted in local languages and cultures, such as isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, and others; secondly, to show how legal concepts like rights and justice are often (mis-)translated from oral, cultural, and linguistic contexts into English, resulting in a loss of meaning and perpetuating colonial-apartheid logics and third, to address the exclusion of indigenous perspectives from formal legal discourse, and how re-centring these perspectives can lead to a more inclusive, culturally grounded understanding of justice.