Negotiation of justice: the discursive construction of attitudinal positioning in bilingual legal judgments of HKSAR v KWAN WAN KI
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Wei Yu
Wei Yu is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, whose research interests lie in legal discourse analyses, legal translation, legal semiotics, and legal culture. Her research articles have been published in
Social Semiotics (Taylor & Francis, 2020),the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law (Springer, 2020; 2021),Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative: Public Memory, Identity, and Critique (Springer, 2021),Research Handbook on Jurilinguistics (Edward Elgar, 2023),Research Handbook on Legal Semiotics (Edward Elgar, 2023), andHandbook on Cyber Hate, the Modern Cyber Evil (Springer, forthcoming). She has also co-translated two academic works,The Quest to Cyber Superiority (China Democracy and Law Press, 2019), andEnforcing International Cultural Heritage Law (China Democracy and Law Press, 2021).
Abstract
In appeal cases, judges from different levels of courts may have varying perspectives on the same set of facts, leading to different sentencing decisions. This study focuses on a specific traffic incident case in Hong Kong. In this case, a trial judge and a collegial panel at the High Court hold divergent opinions regarding the same set of facts, expressed through two different narrations and varying degrees of leniency in their rulings. By applying the framework of Appraisal Theory within a contextualized analysis, this paper reveals that the trial judge and the appellate judges employ differing amounts of evaluative expressions in reaching their decisions. I argue that evaluative language functions as a discursive strategy for negotiating justice, encompassing the narration of legal facts and the construction of legal arguments across different levels of the court system. Furthermore, through an examination of discrepancies between the two language versions, I contend that evaluative expressions, particularly the degree of attitude within the Appraisal Framework, warrant attention in the practice of legal translation. This attention is crucial for achieving a consistent level of emotive entropy in both language versions.
About the author
Wei Yu is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, whose research interests lie in legal discourse analyses, legal translation, legal semiotics, and legal culture. Her research articles have been published in Social Semiotics (Taylor & Francis, 2020), the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law (Springer, 2020; 2021), Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative: Public Memory, Identity, and Critique (Springer, 2021), Research Handbook on Jurilinguistics (Edward Elgar, 2023), Research Handbook on Legal Semiotics (Edward Elgar, 2023), and Handbook on Cyber Hate, the Modern Cyber Evil (Springer, forthcoming). She has also co-translated two academic works, The Quest to Cyber Superiority (China Democracy and Law Press, 2019), and Enforcing International Cultural Heritage Law (China Democracy and Law Press, 2021).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- The YouTube-induced sequential categorization of the topical device of Amber Heard’s “lies”: an ethnomethodological forensic-linguistic perspective
- Exploring network content ecosystem evaluation model based on Chinese judicial discourse of digital platform
- Voluntary assisted dying and euthanasia’s perpetual pendulum in Australia
- Investigating the targeted use of (dis)agreement in leave to appeal decisions of the HKSAR appellate courts: a corpus-assisted discourse analysis
- Violence, responsibility and best interests: children rights in Elizabeth Harrower’s A Few Days in the Country and Other Stories
- Constructing cybersecurity discourse via deconstructing legislation
- Negotiation of justice: the discursive construction of attitudinal positioning in bilingual legal judgments of HKSAR v KWAN WAN KI
- Between nature, law and social expectations – a case study of approaches to human–wildlife conflicts resulting from synanthropization and synurbanization in the Republic of Poland
- Legal regulation of generative AI: a multidimensional construction
