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Showing posts from February, 2018

Legal translation and legal transparency

Nearly three years ago the problems of bilingual law were discussed on www.english-in-asia.blogspot.com   (2016.5.26). In general, lawyers and judges prefer to deal with cases in one language, even if they themselves speak several, as they fear that ambiguities may arise when different languages are used. So most legal systems work monolingually, with translation and interpreting to produce official records in the official language. Asia, however, has several legal systems where more than one language is used. Bilingual legal systems often result from the introduction of a local language in countries where the law was previously administered in a colonial language. Hence Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and many Indian States allow the use of Bangla, Chinese, Malay, Sinhala or Tamil, or various Indian State languages in court alongside English. Macao and Timor Leste allow Chinese and Tetun respectively to be used alongside Portuguese. Why didn't these co