Bridging the Gap between language and law : translational issues in creating legal chinese in Hong Kong

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This paper aims to address, under China's policy of 'one country, two systems', the special style of the 'youthful' Chinese legal language in Hong Kong's legislation and the dilemmas faced by the general public and legal professionals in using it, to discuss key issues, and to suggest ways of solving its existing problems. It also offers new perspectives and solutions to some of the issues of this 'new' technical language that was originally a translation product. Since Chinese, along with English, became one of the two official legal languages of Hong Kong in 1997, legal Chinese has essentially consisted of 'translationese' derived from the translations on English common law and the bilingual legal drafting process in Hong Kong, with many novel coinages and a heavily Europeanized grammatical style.