Revisiting judgment translation in Hong Kong

Le Cheng; Lianzhen He

doi:10.1515/sem-2016-0007

Article

Revisiting judgment translation in Hong Kong

Le Cheng and Lianzhen He

Published/Copyright: January 22, 2016

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From the journal Semiotica Volume 2016 Issue 209

Abstract

As Hong Kong is the only common law jurisdiction operating in Chinese, alongside English, writing a common law judgment in Chinese is like exploring an uncharted domain in legal discourse. Apart from those judgments originally written in Chinese, Chinese judgments have also been prepared by way of translation from English. Besides, there are also English translations of Chinese judgments of jurisprudential value. Judgments in Hong Kong therefore present an interesting case for study both from a legal point of view and from the perspective of discourse analysis. As Chinese judgments in Hong Kong to a large extent mirror images of their English counterparts, they provide us with insights into how judicial thinking embodied in one language is carried over to another. As the translation of court judgments can serve as a clue to the understanding of how judicial thinking is transferred and reflected in another language, this study looks into some of the fundamental problems of legal translation in general and translation of court judgments in particular, showing how the sociosemiotic approach can shed light on those problems.

Keywords: judgment; translation; judicial thinking; sociosemiotic approach; discourse analysis; Hong Kong

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to King Kui Sin, MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), formerly Acting Head of the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics and now Adjunct Professor and Special Consultant at Hang Seng College of Management, for his insightful comments on the draft of this paper and his kind help with some invaluable resources.

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Published Online: 2016-1-22

Published in Print: 2016-3-1

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https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2016-0007

Keywords for this article

judgment; translation; judicial thinking; sociosemiotic approach; discourse analysis; Hong Kong