Bilingual legal terminology in Hong Kong

Abstract

The aims of this chapter are to describe the development of bilingual legal terminology in Hong Kong, to identify current issues and to explore future directions, including finding appropriate strategies to translate English legal terms into Chinese, based on key recent examples. Having been under the British rule for more than 150 years, Hong Kong is for the first time in history translating the entire common law system into Chinese. This process of “legal bilingualism” started at the legislative level and then extended to the judicial level, with the first bilingual law enacted in 1989 and the first English judgment translated into Chinese in 1995. However, there has been criticism of some newly coined Chinese legal terms. It is hoped that while the translation of case law continues, more suitable methods will be adopted to translate English legal terms into Chinese, that meet both the local needs of this post-colonial city and the needs of the Chinese world at large.