Pluricentric legal Chinese
A Rethink on harmonization and uniformization of legal terminology
Chinese is the language of legislation and of court and administrative procedures in several jurisdictions as well
as in numerous international organizations. Its legal status differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and displays its
pluricentric character. Legal acts that are issued in these jurisdictions demonstrate therefore different levels of terminological
formation and other legal-linguistically relevant varieties. It is the task of legal lexicography to register lexical varieties of
legal Chinese in the relevant jurisdictions. However, in addition to all lexicological and lexicographical efforts, the question
could be asked whether terminological harmonization constitutes the appropriate answer to problems caused by pluricentric Chinese
legal terminology. It could be claimed that the task of legal linguists is not only to research but also to shape the Chinese
legal language. There exist, in fact, examples of such activities that will be closely scrutinized in this article.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Underlying conceptual issues
- 2.1Legal hybridity and legal culture
- 2.2Legal-linguistic methodology in pluricentric jurisdictions
- 3.Some possible tasks for legal linguists
- 3.1Shaping basic terminology
- 3.2Developing lexicological taxonomy
- 3.3Recommendations
- 4.Trends and limitations
- 5.Conclusion
- Notes
-
Bibliography
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Chan, Clara Ho-yan & Marcus Galdia
2023.
Problems in English-Chinese and Chinese-English legal translation: with a case study of mistranslations.
Comparative Legilinguistics 55
► pp. 118 ff.
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