The pitfalls of linguistic equivalence

Abstract

This paper discusses the problems of legislative translation in Hong Kong through the study of the rules adopted by the Department of Justice to select equivalent lexical terms and from the examination of the sentence structure and legislative expressions in pre-modern and modern ordinances. While literal translation can be effective in achieving “equal intent” on comparison with the original text, this paper will examine supplementary approaches in an attempt to address the problems and contradictions previously experienced in legislative translation and to increase the effectiveness of the translated text.