When attempting to establish the Algiers Regency in 1830, the invading French forces encountered a confounding problem. Knowledge about land tenure status in Ottoman Algeria remained diffuse. It was recorded in Turkish-language archives that had been destroyed or misplaced during the exiling of Hussein Pacha; held in the Algerian vernaculars of local memory; or simply left in flux, with the nomadic lifestyles of many communities mandating flexible borders and communal use. In this paper I return to the oft-discussed problem of land management in French Algeria, offering a new lens of analysis: the multilingualism endemic to Algerian society. By mid-century, the colony was home not just to indigenous populations who spoke Hebrew, Berber, and Arabic dialects, but also to a growing European settler population that expressed itself in Maltese or Italian as often as it did in French. I show how the francophone administration grappled not just with collecting diffuse forms of knowledge into a single official record, but also with representing that knowledge in a manner suitable to the multilingual populace. If the colony officially remained committed to administration in multiple languages, in practice it struggled to bridge the gap between local communicative practices and official bureaucratic processes. Notarial records and other files on land expropriation, maintained over a fifty-year period (1854-1895) by the Algerian national rail company, form the backbone of this study. These records underscore the ubiquity of colonial translation across the nineteenth century, illuminating the repetitive nature of the acts but also the insecurity of the interpreter corps. Military and judicial interpreters, officially certified to translate in such matters, mediated negotiations and signed these documents, but so too did language professors, merchants, and local grocers. And because the east-west rail axis cut indiscriminately across traditional landholding divides—urban versus rural, arable versus pasture, individually held versus communally used—it is particularly helpful in illuminating the extent to which the colonial administration failed to administer all its populations equally. The bureaucratic inconsistencies evident in supposedly identical expropriation processes highlight the extent to which official procedures and extemporaneous administration combined to ensure inequitable outcomes and entrench the settler colonial state.