Rhetoric Devices And The Translation Of Them-on The Translation Of A Hksar Judgment

Judgment in Hong Kong is named as ‘Pan An Shu'.Affected by historical conditions,Hong Kong follows Common Law and Case Law plays a major role in its genealogy of law.For this reason,precedents invoked by judges are extremely common in judgments.Sufficient arguments and demonstrations make up the main part of judgments.By contrast,judgments in mainland,such as civil judgments,are in a single and unified form,which contains ‘litigant's information',‘cause of action and its hearing'.Owing to its ‘Normative' feature,however,judgments in mainland usually lack the detailed illustrations and demonstrations,consequently,the credibility of judgments is weakened,which leads to the less acceptability from litigants and the public.In order to demonstrate the credibility of their arguments,judges need to resort to rhetoric devices.As forensic texts are serious,the rhetoric skills thereof are latent and passive,without variable expressions or passionate terms.It emphasizes on building sentences and paragraphs to achieve the fluency in content and clarity in structure.For a judgment in Hong Kong court,rhetoric is always in the forms of clear tiers in contents and detailed arguments,which are essential for the legitimacy and rationality of the court order.Only by the employment of the right rhetoric devices could litigants and the public be convinced and the order be accepted.This report focuses on the translation of a judgment published by Hong Kong Family Court in 2016.It has 106 paragraphs in total,more than 80% of which are the arguments and demonstrations(including invoking precedents)of legal hearings that make up the grounds of the order.All these grounds jointly support the judge's decision and achieve the acceptability in litigants.This report emphasizes rhetoric devices and the translation of them in ‘Pan An Shu'.First,the author lists and summarizes the structure and content of ‘Pan An Shu'.The author analyzes the arrangement of paragraphs and sentences to show rhetoric examples,and finds out the usage of many rhetoric devices,such as evaluation,presupposition,intertextuality,emotion arousing and metaphor.Based on several rhetoric examples in ‘Pan An Shu',the author demonstrates her ideas and detailed skills during the translation.With these translation skills,the author expects to keep the original logic system and rhetoric effects in Chinese version so as to achieve the communicative function of translation.