Building conceptual mechanisms for legislative translation

Wang Ling

The Chinese University of Hong Kong,

It is widely held in translation studies that translating a text is not merely translating its language but also translating the culture which gives the text meaning. But how this is done or whether it can be done is not at all clear.

When translating the law from English into Chinese in the run-up to 1997 when Hong Kong was to return to Chinese rule, law translators were confronted with an apparently insurmountable dilemma: preserving the meaning and culture of the English text on the one hand, and preserving the linguistic and cultural features of Chinese in the translated text, i.e., transferring the legal culture of the common law into the Chinese language while preserving the culture of the Chinese language.

This paper addresses the question of cultural transfer in legislative translation. It shows that the transfer of a legal culture necessitates both conceptual and linguistic adjustment on the part of the receiving culture. It also shows that translation as an act of interlingual communication and translation as an act of cultural transfer belong to two different levels of linguistic operation. Meta-linguistic and extra-translational mechanisms are required in order to effect successful legislative translation.