探討中國與美國之間的法律語言相似度：以中國商標法英譯為例

Abstract

本論文探討中華人民共和國2008年商標法文本之「英文化」相關話題。文本比較顯示該法之語法結構與美國法律語言非常雷同，幾乎完全背離臺灣，及早起中國與香港慣用法律文本傳統句法。雖然句法相似，美國與中國法律條文之間仍然存在諸多語詞方面的差別，因此不能概括定論中國法律措辭句法完全是美國智慧財產法的中譯版本。 根據文本比較結果，作者認為有足夠理由顯示北京大學之商標法英譯版本句子高順暢度是因為中文原文結構上與其英譯本相似度頗高。本研究探討重點在於證明中國商標法使 用之語言在詞層級上（phrase level）非常相似。本論文採取非量化研究，句法比較以「詞」（phrase）為單位，文本涵蓋中國商標法第3(2) 、6、14(5) 、16(1)、22、29、60(2)等條。為了更充分對比語言效應，文中也涉略臺灣與香港法律語言發展相關議題。 關鍵詞： 中國法律語言，句法，中國商標法北大翻譯版，法律賦予，詞層級，美國法律語言Looking deeper into the official translations into English of PRC intellectual property law provided by Peking University, especially the more recent revisions thereof, one finds a high level of smoothness and consistency that surprising for a language that does not belong to the Indo-European family. While one could logically argue that the apparently native English-like structure and wording of English translations of PRC law are the result of either an especially adept translator who adheres strictly to Eugene Nida’s idea of functional equivalence, or, in the vein of Hans Vermeer, is a translator whose mission is to translate in such a fashion as to render a look similar to that of a English source text, there appears to be something more at play here; something in particular that speakers of Chinese can find in Chinese law: that the syntactic structures of the PRC’s Trademark Law are already very similar to what is generally accepted to be standard English legal syntax. The current linguistic state of affairs with respect to PRC intellectual property law was not always the case in the PRC nor is it the case in Taiwan, whose legal language maintains far more syntactic similarity with Qing Dynasty law than it does with PRC law despite the introduction of new legal concepts over the centuries. Lastly, it is clear that while similarities do exist between statutes of the US Code in Terms of content, the phrasing of the former generally does differ from the latter. As such, any claim that that the PRC Trademark Law is a translationese edition of the US Code is untenable. The findings explicated here provide a strong linguistic basis for the idea that the syntactic smoothness of the Peking University translations of the PRC Trademark Law is due to similarities in syntactic structure between the Chinese language used in that law and its English translations. This is also a trend that is made more apparent when the English translation to which the Chinese of the PRC Trademark Law is being compared is writing in a more Americanized style. This study will not entirely set out to prove that Chinese intellectual property law is at the worst simply English using Chinese characters, but rather that the Chinese used in the most recent version of the Trademark Law of the People’s Republic of China is highly similar to legal English in terms of syntax at the phrase-level. Keywords: Syntax, law, PRC Trademark Law, Taiwan, Legal Translation, phrase-level, Language Simplification