Research Rationale

Chapter 1: Introduction

The Judiciary of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the People's Republic of China regularly translates selected Chinese judgments of legal significance into English and makes it available on their website alongside other English judgments. The quality of these translated judgments provides a firm foundation for the creation of a comparable corpus that we can study, to determine the nature of translational characteristics in legal texts, as well as the magnitude of such characteristics in translations when compared to actual English texts.

Using a corpus-based approach, we looked at explicitation, a much studied "universal" of translation, and sought to understand and determine the extent of its presence under a legal backdrop.

1.1 Research Rationale

The right conditions or combination of elements should be present, and at the right time, for any particular paper to be written. Explicitation studies might not exist in their current form had Vinay (1958) not coined the term decades ago, or had Baker (1993) and Kulka (1998) not proposed the study of translation universals and the explicitation hypothesis. The same could be said about the study of corpora and legal translation, both aided greatly by the advent

of technology, and perhaps made possible in the case of the former. Given these factors, this paper was written in the belief that this was a good time for combining these topics into a focal point of study.

In my opinion, there are a few main reasons why a corpus-based study of explicitation in legal translation is appropriate at this point in time. Firstly, we have the availability of an

extensive collection of translated legal judgments on the Hong Kong Judiciary's website, which

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are found alongside other judgments written in English. The presence of these texts makes it easy for us to construct a proper comparable corpus, one made up of two sub-corpora that share very similar content. The following sub-chapter provides a more in-depth description of Hong Kong's legal system and the Hong Kong Judiciary.

1.1.1 Language and Translation in Hong Kong's Legal System

Signed in 1984 between the United Kingdom and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Sino-British Joint Declaration guaranteed the continuation of Hong Kong’s capitalist system, including its legal system, for the next 50 years after the island’s handover to the PRC in 1997.

Chapter 1, Article 5 of The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (1997), which is the constitutional document of Hong Kong, states that:

The socialist system and policies shall not be practised in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and the previous capitalist system and way of life shall remain unchanged for 50 years. (Cap 1, art 5)

This meant that, although essentially a part of the PRC, the principle of "One Country, Two Systems" allows Hong Kong to practise a high degree of autonomy as a Special

Administrative Region (HKSAR). An integral component of this autonomy is Hong Kong's unique legal system, a legacy derived from its status as a British colony. Hong Kong’s judiciary

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exists under this system and operates independently of the executive and legislative organs of Hong Kong.

Owning to its unique history, Hong Kong's judiciary provides an ideal backdrop for the study of explicitation in legal translation. In its days as a British colony (1841-1941, 1945-1997), English was originally the sole official language in Hong Kong until 1974 when the Official Languages Ordinance (1974) was enacted. This ordinance allowed for the use of Chinese in communication between the government and public, which naturally included the use of said language in court proceedings. The Official Languages Ordinance (1974) states that:

(1) The English and Chinese languages are declared to be the official languages of Hong Kong for the purposes of communication between the Government or any public officer and members of the public and for court proceedings. (Amended 51 of 1995 s.2)

(2) The official languages possess equal status and, subject to the provisions of this Ordinance, enjoy equality of use for the purposes set out in subsection (1). (§ 3)

Since both Chinese and English hold equal status as official languages on the island, the judgments published by the judiciary may be written in either Chinese or English, with some important ones being subsequently translated into the other language (Chinese to English, or English to Chinese). This is particularly apparent with key judgments in Chinese given the large number of Chinese-to-English translations that can be found on the Hong Kong Judiciary's Legal Reference System and the Judiciary of HKSAR.

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The translated judgments are translated by the Judgment Translation Unit of the Judiciary (HKSAR) and subjected to a vetting process carried out by legal professionals. At the end of every translated judgment, the names of the translation party and vetting party are always indicated.

When discovered, translation errors in the texts are also promptly corrected in the published judgments. Readers are also informed of the translation error via the publishing of a corrigendum, which clearly indicates which parts of the judgment itself were amended due to translation errors. I have covered these translation processes in brief to underscore the stringent standards practised by the Hong Kong Judiciary. And with this level of attention given to the quality of judgment translations comes a great opportunity to construct a comparable corpus consisting of judgments originally written in English on one side and Chinese judgments translated into English on the other.

1.1.2 Explicitation

The next major point to discuss is explicitation. Explicitation has been posited as a

"universal" of translation, a phenomenon inherent to the very nature of translation itself. Thus as a research topic, legal translation provides a good subject for research since it could serve as a

"contrast subject" of sorts when it comes to explicitation. This is because

explicitation phenomena might manifest differently depending on the text type in question.

To explain this, consider a study on tourist information like Olohan and Baker (2000), which produced findings that indicated a strong tendency towards explicitation in English translated from German, as opposed to actual English texts. Given that tourist information, compared to legal texts, is likely to be written in a more colloquial manner and focused on

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readability, would the kinds of explicitation found in this genre be applicable to legal texts? The same is true for other genres as well when compared to legal translation. Since few studies on explicitation in a legal environment had been conducted in the past, it would make sense to explore this field and thereby help expand the scope and comprehensiveness of explicitation studies.

Based on the concept of explicitation, the Explicitation Hypothesis was proposed by Blum-Kulka and it postulates a high level of cohesive explicitness in translated texts, as well as the idea that explicitation in translations is a universal phenomenon.

1.1.3 Concordance Tools and Ease of Access to Resources

With easier access to concordance tools like AntConc that are freely available, the use of corpora in academic studies will become increasingly common, and this trend will be further aided by the availability of various types of corpora on the web. Corpora such as the British National Corpus (BNC) have been used in many papers in the linguistics and translation fields.

Apart from actual corpora, various online resources may also be compiled into corpora.

Although this would require much more time and effort, they allow for the construction of corpora that is relevant to specific fields. Unlike corpora like the BNC which was designed to represent the breadth of English usage rather, a manually constructed corpus offers more flexibility. The corpus used in this study is an example of a manually constructed corpus that serves to represent the forms of English and translated English found in legal writing.

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