ABSTRACT
The legislative texts are translated for informative purposes in Mainland China. Since China's accession to the WTO in 2001, the Chinese government has promulgated or amended volumes of statutes designated to implement Chinas commitments. This chapter considers a Criminal Procedure Law (CPL) of the People's Republic of China (PRC) as an example, because CPL is a yardstick to measure the status quo of human rights in China. There are problems of different kinds in the original Chinese version of the CPL, which may cause problems and difficulties in the English translation of the CPL. The major problems identified in the English translation can be categorized into three types: informality, inaccuracy, and inconsistency. Legal translators in China apparently give little attention to this prerequisite and are too arbitrary in producing a rendering which is far away from the meaning of the source text.
