Revisiting judgment translation in Hong Kong

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.

A corpus-based interpretation of the discourse–cognitive–society triangle on Chinese court judgments

“…At the micro level, the social dimension of SCA is realized in the discourse behavior of text and conversation, which is caused by the social group relations and their common cognition at the macro level (van Dijk, 2009b). Therefore, as a particular type of judicial discourse for legal professionals (Cheng and He, 2016), the social function of the court judgments correspond to the cognitive source and builds the surface structure with various discourse components. In CCJ, faith with citation function provides a legal basis for judgment analysis, and induction with depiction function offers the information of direct experience for evidence.…”