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5

一個法律語料庫的誕生和運用 The Construction and Application of a Legal Corpus


作者
梁倩雯
Author
Ester, S.M. Leung
摘要

自一九八九年香港首先有雙語立法始,香港政府致力於把英文法例翻譯成中文。至於法庭聆訊有翻譯服務提供,早在殖民地政府初期已有出現,但究竟雙語立法和法庭翻譯服務對於聆訊過程有些甚麼影響呢,卻鮮有研究提及。建構這個法律語料庫的目的就是要研究:一)香港律政司在處理法律條例方面的翻譯有甚麼特色和採取了甚麼策略;二)翻譯有關性罪行的案件時,翻譯員最常碰到的有些甚麼問題,翻譯員又有甚麼對策。這語料庫收集了所有有關性罪行的中、英文法例和一些在香港高等法院處理過有關性罪行的雙語聆訊的過程。

Synopsis

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. However, very little is known about the impacts of bilingual legislation, translation, and interpretation on trial proceedings. A corpus consisting of the Chinese and English versions of the Sexual Offence Ordinance (Cap 200 s 19-153) and the interpretation of sexual offence-related cases tried before the High Courts of Hong Kong is constructed. The corpus is used for the analysis with the specific foci on the strategies employed in translating the ordinances from English to Chinese and problems associated with the interpreting of sexual offence cases between Cantonese and English in the High Courts of Hong Kong. Findings help to i) identify problems and strategies adopted in the translation of ordinances from English to Chinese, focusing on the ways how the characteristics of legal English are dealt with in the translation provided by the Justice Department of Hong Kong; ii) examine problems and strategies adopted by interpreters when interpreting sexual offence cases in the High Court.