The Verdict Of Hong Kong Court "Imbalance" In Chinese And English

Since 1997 Hong Kong Special Administrative Region back to China, the political system, social economy, degree of rule of law have got considerable progress. Language is a tool of communication, and it is also an indispensable part in daily life. After the Opium War of 1848, after a variety of unequal treaties, the Qing Dynasty has been ceded Hong Kong to the British, and Hong Kong started its colonial history nearly 100 years. As it is a British colony, British teach students English instead of Chinese. As a result English became local statutory language. In July 1st, Hong Kong returned to motherland mainland, and became the important part of the People's Republic of China. While the Basic Law of Hong Kong article 9 says that Chinese and English are both the official languages of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Logically, both English and Chinese should all be the official language of Hong Kong. However, the fact is that the status of Chinese is neglected in the judicial practice. This problem is not only related to the vital interests of the people in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, but also relates to the sovereignty of the country. This paper tries to analyze the problem from the following four parts:The first part is mainly talk about the basic situation of Bilingual legal system. First of all, the concept of bilingual legal is to introduce what is bilingual legal system, "bilingual" is the word of "English" bilingualism translation. It is also called bilingual phenomenon, which refers to the person who was influenced by family environment and the education and then they can master another foreign language that is besides their mother tongue. Through the introduction of the concept of bilingual legal system situation, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region is actually a bilingual legal system society. The progress of the Bilingual legal system history of the society in Hong Kong makes the Hong Kong bilingual legal problems more clearly to the readers. The people of Hong Kong are not afraid of hardships, and strive for their language rights. Then, I will use a legal perspective to analysis the relevant laws and regulations in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in bilingual legal. This situation is refer to the ought situation that Hong Kong should be.The second part is mainly analysis of the actual state of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Through the empirical research method, the author statistics the written judgment from 1997 July 1 to 2013 December 31. And the sampling method was used to extract the represent two types of cases of the different levels of courts in English and Chinese judgments of image intuitive reflected with the histogram. In accordance with the conclusions of empirical analysis obtained, respectively from the legal, social, economic and other aspects analysis of the causes of the Chinese and English "imbalances".The third part is mainly analysis the disadvantage in Chinese and English "imbalance" phenomenon. First of all, this is a kind of indifference on the Basic Law of Hong Kong, the Basic Law of Hong Kong is the "constitution" in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The legal statue is higher than other laws; secondly, the basic right of parties is not fully guaranteed. In Hong Kong, these people who knows Chinese reached more than 98%, while these people who knows English is less than 2%.The resident in Hong Kong are not familiar with the judgment in the case, which will no doubt to influence their rights. What's more, the court have to employ special translators for the parties to provide translation. This has also led to a lawsuit cost increase.The fourth part is mainly offer some measures to solve the “imbalance” problem. To solve this problem should to raise awareness and implementation of the basic law of bilingual requirements of system mechanism, the government and judicial of Hong Kong shall have corresponding policies and institutional arrangements and other initiatives, raise the awareness and to improve the awareness of residents; then these people who is good at English should be cultivated.