International Human Rights Discourse in Legal Linguistic Training: Multilingualism and Terminological Challenges Across Institutions

This study examines how legal terminology and phraseology operate across three international human rights courts: the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACtHPR). Drawing on a 7.4-million-word corpus of judgments as well as the foundational treaties, the study maps a terminological–phraseological continuum shaped by each court’s multilingual regime and translation practices that serves to enhance thematic and cultural competencies of legal translators. While the courts share English as a working lingua franca and rely on legal translation to ensure multilingualism, their discourse reveals distinct patterns of convergence and drift. Translation status of analyzed texts—co-authentic (ECtHR), translated (IACtHR), or mixed (ACtHPR)—is treated as an explanatory variable affecting lexical stability and collocational behavior. The analysis identifies treaty-derived and court-created expressions whose meanings shift through institutional bilingualism and cross-court borrowing. Findings suggest that multilingualism simultaneously stabilizes and diversifies human rights discourse, producing routine formulae in some contexts and variability in others, exacerbated by different degree of attention to translation quality assessment and linguistic precedent. The study argues for an integrated pedagogical approach combining comparative law, legal linguistics, and corpus-assisted translation training.