What Can a Bilingual Corpus Tell Us About the Translation and Interpretation of Rape Trials?

Abstract

Since the enactment of the first Hong Kong bilingual ordinance in 1989, tremendous effort and resources have been put to translating English legal documents into Chinese. Long before the implementation of bilingual legislation, the provision of interpreting services has remained an entrenched practice in the courtrooms of Hong Kong. This study has adopted a corpora approach to re-examine what seems to be reasonable and routine practices of the bilingual, legal system, the impacts of bilingual legislation, translation, and interpretation on trial proceedings. Results generated from the corpus show the problems of anglicized Chinese translation of the Sexual Offences Ordinance under the Britis..