A Comparative Study On The Translation Of Judgments In Chinese Mainland And HKSAR

With the increasing economic and cultural exchanges between the ChineseMainland and HKSAR, legal issues concerning parties from both sides are also on therise. The judgment is the most concerned by the parties involved in a legal dispute forit clearly shows the processing result of the dispute. Meanwhile, with the enlargementof China’s international influence and the development of HK’s bilingual legal system,it is more than necessary to translate the judgments at the moment. In order tofacilitate the involved parties to understand the judgments, it’s better to translate thejudgments made by the court to the language that the involved parties are familiarwith. Moreover, for the sake of publicity, it is necessary for both the Mainland andHK to translate their court judgments, especially those of great public and mediainterest into English and Chinese respectively.With the differences of legal culture in mind, we should also know that legaltranslation is not only a process of linguistic transcoding, but also an act ofcommunication within the mechanism of law, involving legal cultures, legalmechanisms, and legislative intention of the original legal text, legal drafter and otherfactors. Therefore, legal translators are constrained by the legal culture and legalmechanism of both the source language and the target language. Considering theparticular features of legal translation, the author attempts to apply the translationalnorms theory to legal translation study in this thesis so as to provide guidance to legaltranslation practice.As well-known western translation theorists, both Gideon Toury and AndrewChesterman are great contributors to the study of translation norms. As a leadingfigure in descriptive translation study, Gideon Toury, based on case studies，haspointed out that translation is a norm governed activity, and the translator, fromselecting the text to that of the translation strategy, is constrained by many factors orconventions, such as social conventions and cultural elements or norms. Accordingly,he categorized three kinds of norms: preliminary norms, initial norms and operational norms. Andrew Chesterman, drew from the work of Toury and enlightened from thecategorizations of norms in linguistics and sociology, divided norms in translationactivities into two categories: expectancy norms and professional norms. Expectancynorms refer to the expectancy of the target language community towards thetranslation, such as the expectancy towards the grammatical features, acceptability,style, etc. of the translation. Professional norms regulate the methods and strategiesacceptable in the translation activities. Professional norms subordinate and areregulated by expectancy norms (仝亚辉，2009).Based on the differences of legal culture between the Mainland and HK, thethesis seeks to shed some light upon the future studies of legal translation from theperspective of tanslation norms, provide some reference for competent judicialbranches in writing judgments and establishing rules and norms for legal translationand offer an innovative research prospective for future researchers in legal translationevaluation.