Article,
Bridging the Gap between language and law: Translational issues in creating legal Chinese in Hong Kong
Babel: Revue internationale de la traduction/International Journal of Translation, (2012)
Abstract
Until 1997, when Hong Kong returned to China’s sovereignty as a special administrative region, its official language of Hong Kong had always been English. This political change prompted the addition of Chinese as another official language in the territory where the native language of the majority is Cantonese (Li 1987: 120). To prepare for the bilingual legislation made possible by the high degree of autonomy and ‘one country, two systems’ policy stipulated in the Joint Declaration of 1984, the Hong Kong Government began the translation of English common law into Chinese.
