East Barely Meets West in Hong Kong Difficulty of Translating English Laws into Chinese May Stymie Justice

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It's quite a challenge. How do you translate the common law, some of the terms incomprehensible even to untrained English speakers, into Chinese, the language of a country with no common-law tradition, not even, some would argue, respect for the rule of law?

For the past 10 years, Tony Yen and his crew of 46 lawyers and translators have been laboring mightily to translate into Chinese the legal accumulation of 150 years of British colonial rule. That amounts to some 550 ordinances, or 21,000 pages of text.

All of the basic translations have been completed, and they are slowly working their way through a complex vetting process that is about two-thirds complete. …