| Legal terminology, as the core of legal language and the difficulties of legal translation, is a big difficulty in legal transplantation. The translation of legal terminology directly affects the quality of the translation of legal documents. How to interpret the connotations of legal terminology in different legal systems and transplant it from one language to another is the most important issue concerning the translation of legal terminology.There are two major legal systems in the present world:the civil law system and the common law system. Due to some historical reasons, the legal system of Hong Kong belongs to the common law system while the legal system of Chinese mainland is regarded as the civil law system. After the hand-over of Hong Kong, the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region regulate that Hong Kong reserves the tradition of the common law under the principle of "one country, two systems" Later on, the legal department of the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China constructed the Bilingual Law Information System (BLIS), which provides the bilingual English/Chinese legal texts. Since the two versions of the Hong Kong bilingual legal system are characterized with the common law system and recognized as the authentic texts and share the equal legal status, all of which have provided reliable data for interpreting the connotations of legal terminology and translating it.The thesis aims to offer the methods of interpreting the legal terminology by uncovering the implications and inferences underlying in the explanation of the terms in the corpus-based approach. Firstly, based on the BLIS, the author of the thesis collects the sections of the texts with legal terms in a principled way to construct the parallel corpus. Secondly, the annotation is done at the sentence level and paragraph level respectively and the alignment work on the collected bilingual data is done with the assistance of the software ParaConc. Thirdly, the lexico-grammatical annotation will be done. The grammatical annotation is used to distinguish sentence types in the grammatical way and the lexicographical annotation is adopted from Sinclair’s theory of classifying the lexical statements which will be conductive to the analysis of the explanation of each term from the lexicographical approach. Lastly, combining the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the statistic data and the semantic analysis of the two main verbs "mean(s)" and "include(s)" in the lexical statements, the lexical relations between TOPIC and GLOSS will be discussed by analyzing the typical examples to explore the specific methods of interpreting the connotations of legal terminology.By constructing an English/Chinese corpus on legal vocabulary, the author has explored the ways of interpreting legal terminology from the lexicographical approach, which will offer help for the translation of legal terminology. Besides the methods of analyzing the semantic relations between TOPIC and GLOSS and the way of paraphrasing the lexical statements introduced in the thesis will facilitate the interpretation of the connotations of legal terminology.This study shows that the construction and research of the Hong Kong bilingual legal terminology parallel corpus can offer not only the reference to the translation between English and Chinese under the common law system but also the paradigm for compiling the specialized dictionaries on law by using the natural language. The exploration on the implications and inferences of the lexical statements of the legal terminology will provide methodological guidance for interpreting the connotations of the legal terminology. |
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