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.
