ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a number of specific linguistic challenges involved in bilingual and multilingual legal systems. It considers what makes translation of legal texts particularly difficult, describes cross-cultural communication barriers that exist in the courtroom, and examines how legal meaning is decided for divergent language texts of the same law. The chapter shows that how researchers have become engaged with these topics in other bilingual postcolonial territories, including Malaysia and Hong Kong. It analyses why legal translation is a particularly difficult, specialised subfield within translation. The most widely discussed problem in legal translation is that of terminology: lack of equivalent terms and concepts in the target language and culture. Cross-cultural aspects of communication in the courtroom are mediated by court interpreters. In Hong Kong, courtroom interpretation is a service provided not, as is the case in most other jurisdictions, for linguistic minorities, but for the linguistic majority.
