Exploring Syntactic Similarity Between China’s Trademark Law and American Legal English Through Translation

• Main Authors: Maxwell Koenen, 郭邁偉
• Other Authors: Carlos Tee
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/km5ug6

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 翻譯研究所 === 107 === Looking deeper into the official translations into English of PRC intellectual property law provided by Peking University, especially the more recent revisions thereof, one finds a high level of smoothness and consistency that surprising for a language that does not belong to the Indo-European family. While one could logically argue that the apparently native English-like structure and wording of English translations of PRC law are the result of either an especially adept translator who adheres strictly to Eugene Nida’s idea of functional equivalence, or, in the vein of Hans Vermeer, is a translator whose mission is to translate in such a fashion as to render a look similar to that of a English source text, there appears to be something more at play here; something in particular that speakers of Chinese can find in Chinese law: that the syntactic structures of the PRC’s Trademark Law are already very similar to what is generally accepted to be standard English legal syntax. The current linguistic state of affairs with respect to PRC intellectual property law was not always the case in the PRC nor is it the case in Taiwan, whose legal language maintains far more syntactic similarity with Qing Dynasty law than it does with PRC law despite the introduction of new legal concepts over the centuries. Lastly, it is clear that while similarities do exist between statutes of the US Code in Terms of content, the phrasing of the former generally does differ from the latter. As such, any claim that that the PRC Trademark Law is a translationese edition of the US Code is untenable. The findings explicated here provide a strong linguistic basis for the idea that the syntactic smoothness of the Peking University translations of the PRC Trademark Law is due to similarities in syntactic structure between the Chinese language used in that law and its English translations. This is also a trend that is made more apparent when the English translation to which the Chinese of the PRC Trademark Law is being compared is writing in a more Americanized style. This study will not entirely set out to prove that Chinese intellectual property law is at the worst simply English using Chinese characters, but rather that the Chinese used in the most recent version of the Trademark Law of the People’s Republic of China is highly similar to legal English in terms of syntax at the phrase-level. Keywords: Syntax, law, PRC Trademark Law, Taiwan, Legal Translation, phrase-level, Language Simplification