User:Chu Tse-tien/Progress and History

zh:User:Chu_Tse-tien/中国大陆刑事判决书英译工作报告

Three Basic Rules on the Translation Style and Quality
Some pedantic, redundant, and bureaucratic sentence patterns can be widely observed in mainland Chinese legal documents. I will try to render the translation as close to the original as possible to convey its pedantic, redundant, and bureaucratic style. (This is important since some judgements were so vacuous that no other details were given apart from these pedantic, redundant, and bureaucratic sentences and structure.)

Some of the original documents contain syntactic or grammatical errors (by adding redundant parts, lacking necessary parts, or giving two or more semantically conflicting parts and such in the sentences). In the most serious cases, they have created such semantic obfuscation that made the sentence incomprehensible. In these situations, I will simply correct the grammatical errors in the translation to avoid confusion or try my best to provide the closest possible interpretation that is both semantically and logically sound based on my educated and prudential guess. (In addition, typos that existed in the original Chinese documents are automatically corrected and will not be reflected in the translation.)

It is also worth noting that the basic laws often cited in these documents were, in most cases, badly translated here on Wikisource—that is, if translations are present. Especially the Criminal Law—it was way out of date (missing all TWELVE amendments by now) and very poorly translated with some choices of words so wrong as to be hilarious. However, it would be a huge amount of work for me to re-translate the Criminal Law, the Criminal Procedure Law, as well as all those untranslated and yet frequently cited Interpretations. Therefore, it would be only wise for me to adhere to the current translations available, and sometimes it means I have to stick to their choices of words for consistency (and for better search results for readers) when they were not so ridiculously incorrect.

Recommended citation format
Given that judgements or other legal documents in mainland China are not codified as they were in the United States, I then humbly suggest adopting the following citation style when referencing: