Bilingual Legislation Translation In Hong Kong: A Communicative Perspective

This thesis is an empirical study on the translation of Hong Kong Ordinances from English into Chinese.Based on the study in New Approach to Legal Translation by Susan ?ar?evi?, this thesis holds that legislation translation is an act of communication with the purpose of producing a target legislation which realizes the equivalent legal effect to the original legislation. On the theoretical level, for the legislation translation to achieve the communicative effect, this thesis first establishes the criteria for legislation translation and explores some influential factors that should be taken into consideration when the translator interprets the source legislation. Then the thesis makes an exploration of the legislation translation procedures, and tries to find the adequate translation strategy used in the translation of Hong Kong Ordinances. In the case study, the thesis makes a comparative study on the differences between English and Chinese on grammatical and syntactic levels. When translating, a translator should bear these differences in mind, and create an idiomatic and comprehensible Chinese version.Hong Kong has a bilingual legal system, where both the English version and the Chinese version of the ordinances are authentic and have the equivalent legal effect. They are called parallel legal texts. The main criterion for a qualified parallel legislation translation is that the translation should conform to the intent and purpose of the original legislation. Therefore, it is of high significance to detect the legal intent and purpose of the original English legislation in the right way in the translation of the English version into the Chinese version.As for translation strategies, domestication and foreignization are indispensible in legislation translation. On one hand, considering the normative and performative functions of legislation, and in order to translate and retain the different legal cultures and legal concepts in an accurate manner, foreignization is adopted to reach a unified legal format. On the other hand, because the target readers include judges, lawyers, and general public, domestication is adopted to produce an idiomatic translation.By analyzing the Chinese version and the English version of Hong Kong Sale of Goods Ordinance, this thesis reaches a conclusion that the Chinese version is not satisfactory, with a large quantity of sentences that are direct copies of the English sentences without conforming to Chinese grammatical and syntactic rules. These literal translations lead to comprehension difficulties. Apart from this defect, there are several translation errors. Supported by the case study, this thesis summarizes the reasons for these unidiomatic translations and translation errors, and presents solutions accordingly.