University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

Translation studies in Hong Kong have been focusing mainly on the literary aspect of the discipline. Although huge amounts of bilingual texts are churned out every year from virtually every government and quasi-government department and other institution, these products of translation, as well as the work processes involved, do not receive due attention of the academia for research purposes. Studies on translation of this type and nature may have largely been ignored. To promote academic studies in this field, this thesis attempts to establish Public Administration Translation as a genre which bears distinctive features and a production process of its own, although the linguistic features of this genre do not form part of the present study and are left for future exploration. To achieve this goal, a general history of Public Administration Translation in Hong Kong with regard to various grades of Public Administration Translation service providers has been compiled to track the development of these grades, as well as the relations among them. With a view to putting Hong Kong’s Public Administration Translation in a sociolinguistic perspective, a sociolinguistic framework regarding societal multilingualism types with reference to territorial monolingualism, bilingualism and trilingualism, as well as diglossia and triglossia, is proposed for discussing Hong Kong’s Public Administration Translation and its service providers. After detailed analysis and discussion, it is suggested that Hong Kong’s sociolinguistic situation has always been evolving in response to its political and demographic development, and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region seems to be moving towards a society of biliteracy (i.e. Standard Written Chinese and written English) and trilingualism (i.e. Cantonese, spoken English and Putonghua) while Hong Kong’s Public Administration Translation keeps reacting accordingly to the changes in the sociolinguistic situation of the community. / published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

International Economic Law (IEL), a sub-discipline of International Law, is concerned with the regulation of international economic relations and the behaviours of States, international organisations, and firms operating in the international arena. Due to the increase in commercial intercourse, translation of International Economic Law has become an important factor in promoting cross-cultural communication. The translation of IEL is not purely a technical exercise that simply involves the linguistic translations from one language to another but rather a social and cultural act. This research sets out to examine the translation of terminology used in International Economic Law (IEL) – drawing on data from a bespoke self-built Parallel Corpus of International Economic Law (PCIEL) using a corpus-based, systematic micro-level framework – to analyse the subject matter and to discuss the feasibility of translating these legal terms at the word level, and the sentence and discourse level, with a particular focus on the impact of cultural influences. The study presents the findings from the Chinese translator’s perspective regarding International Economic Law from English/Chinese into Chinese/English with a focus on the areas of law, economics, and culture. The contribution made by a corpus-based approach applied to the interdisciplinary subject of IEL is explored. In particular, this establishes a link between linguistic and non-linguistic study in translating legal texts, especially IEL. The corpus data are organized in different semantic fields and the translation analysis covers lexical, sentential and cultural perspectives. This research demonstrates that not only linguistic factors, but, also, cultural factors make clear contributions to the translation of terminology in PCIEL.

published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Portuguese

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