Strategies for creating a bilingual legal dictionary

This paper explores the strategies that should be employed when processing legal terminology in a bilingual legal dictionary. The viability of a bilingual law system depends on the consistent use of standardized Chinese terms in courts and their ease of use by general users. Semantic equivalence of a term, however, is not achieved through a literal translation of an English term, and how a term is defined in both statute law and case law must also be taken into consideration. This paper argues that instead of targeting only legal practitioners, the bilingual system of Hong Kong should also aim at educating the public in the general concepts of law and in the use of Chinese legal terminology. A case study demonstrating how to process a legal expression - 'assault occasioning actual bodily harm' - is presented in this paper.