ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a general illustration of the equivalence issue as it relates to legal terms, citing examples from English laws and laws from Hong Kong, the Mainland and Taiwan. The translation of Chinese legal terminology across the three communities can be divided into following five non-exclusive categories. They can be classified into ‘near equivalents’, ‘partial equivalents’ and ‘non-equivalents’. The first two non-exclusive categories are: one or more similar terms from a foreign source with the same renditions of same/similar meaning in both languages and one or more similar terms from a foreign source with different renditions of same/similar meaning in the two languages. The last three categories are one or more similar terms from a foreign source with different renditions of different meaning in the two languages, different terms from a foreign source with different renditions of different meanings, and mistranslation. In the Taiwan Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights translation, ‘layout-design’ is rendered as dianlu buju.
