ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the main legal translation activities that have taken place in Hong Kong, Mainland China and Taiwan, and discusses the general linguistic features of legal Chinese and issue of equivalence in Chinese legal terminology. Entering the twenty-first century, the role of legal translation is becoming even more important with the intensifying trend towards globalisation and the ongoing trend towards Westernisation of the Chinese legal system. The case of Hong Kong is rather special, because the change of sovereignty, when it returned to China as the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the PRC in 1997, has prompted three decades (starting from the 1980s) of wholesale translation of English common law-based legislation into Chinese. Of the ‘two types of translated domestic legislation’ described by Cao, Hong Kong, as a new bilingual jurisdiction, falls into the first type with Canada and Switzerland, which consists of ‘bilingual and multilingual jurisdictions where two or more languages are the official legal languages’.
