Chinese Translation Of English Sandwich Sentences In Hong Kong Common Law: A Corpus-based Study

Because of the requirement of the bilingualism policy,the official languages of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region include both Chinese and English,and in the legal field it continues to adopt the Common Law legal system of British and American countries,with the English and Chinese version authentic texts enjoying the equal legal status,which makes the legal texts of Hong Kong suitable for the study of English-Chinese legal translation.This research attempts to focus on the special sentence pattern with sandwich structure,which is very common in the English version of Hong Kong Common Law.The English Common Law includes many sandwich sentences with complicated structures,which is featured by the embedded parallel structures and adverbial clauses signifying diversified conditions.In order to research into the Chinese translation of the English sandwich sentences in Hong Kong Common Law,the author of this thesis has firstly collected all the English sandwich sentences and their Chinese translation,for the purpose of building an English-Chinese parallel corpus of sandwich sentences extracted from BLIS(Bilingual Laws Information System)established by the Department of Justice of Hong Kong;then,by calculating the word counts of the English sentences,excluding the outliers(too long or too short sentences)and sampling randomly,the author has extracted 300 sandwich sentences;finally,he has tagged the sentences by means of Stanford Parser and conducted a classification and an analysis of the syntactic patterns and summarized the transforming features of sandwich patterns in English-Chinese translation.Results show that,lexically,the Chinese translation of English sandwich sentences retain the features of legal English;and syntactically,the sandwich sentence patterns have been retained in the Chinese translation,but some of the translation result in the variation of the three layers of sandwich sentences due to the restructuring of main clauses and subordinate clauses,especially the adverbial clauses.This thesis is a detailed analysis of the lexical features,external formats and internal structures of sandwich sentences in Hong Kong Common Law based on the comparison of English and Chinese sentence patterns,for the purpose of figuring out the general features and major differences of English sandwich sentences in the Chinese translation,which is linguistically and practically significant in the profound understanding of the Chinese translation of sandwich sentence patterns in the English Common Law of Hong Kong.