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Epistemic modality in translated and non-translated English court judgments of Hong Kong: A corpus-based study

Paper · 2023 · Yanfang Su, Kanglong Liu and Andrew K. F. Cheung

Summary

The paper asks how epistemic modality, meaning the ways a writer signals how probable a claim is, differs between English court judgments written originally in English and those translated from Chinese in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is the only common-law jurisdiction with both Chinese and English as court languages. The authors built a comparable corpus of translated and non-translated English judgments. They classified epistemic markers with the systemic functional framework of Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) along three dimensions: orientation (subjective vs objective, explicit vs implicit), value (low, median, high) and linguistic realisation (modal verbs, lexical verbs, adjectives, nominalisations, and so on).

Non-translated judgments contain proportionally more epistemic modality, and the two corpora distribute orientation differently. In both, median-value markers dominate and high-value markers are rarest. Translated judgments use a narrower range of epistemic expressions. The authors trace this to three causes: normalisation during institutional translation, patterns carried over from the Chinese source texts, and different judicial habits of thought in Chinese and English. The study matters because hedging in judgments ties into the standard of proof and into how precedents are later read.

Key points

  • Framework: SFG categorisation by orientation, value (possibly / probably / certainly) and realisation, applied to Hong Kong court judgments.
  • Original English judgments carry a higher share of epistemic modality than translated ones.
  • In both corpora, median-value markers form the overwhelming majority and high-value markers the smallest group.
  • Several features are missing or rarer in the translations:
    • Lexical verbs such as appear and seem are used less often, so median-value objective markers drop.
    • Nominalised modal adjectives (e.g. possibility) never appear, because Chinese source texts seldom use 可能性.
  • Chinese formulae 本庭/本席認為 ("this court/judge thinks") tend to become first-person forms like "we consider" or "in our/my opinion." This explains the many explicit subjective markers with plural we in translations, while original English judgments favour singular I.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Classifying every stance marker on two independent axes, how certain (value) and who owns the certainty (orientation), gives a compact, explainable description of hedging.
  • I2. Recording the grammatical form of each marker (modal verb, lexical verb, adjective, nominalisation, first-person predicate) helps explain why two text groups differ, not only that they differ.
  • I3. Lower variety and frequency of expressions in translated text reads as a fingerprint of normalisation by a trained, rule-following group of producers.
  • I4. Source-language formulae shape which stance constructions appear in the target, as when 本庭認為 becomes "we consider."
  • I5. The choice between singular I and plural we signals whether an individual or an institution is presented as the believer.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): Each proposition in a frame could get a certainty level plus a stance holder, so "it seems that X" and "I think X" become the same median-value claim with different responsibility.
  • I2 (tree): A small set of UD patterns could map these forms to one epistemic feature, e.g. expletive it + likely + ccomp, seem + xcomp, or I + consider + ccomp.
  • I3 (learn): Comparing marker variety in LLM-teacher or silver outputs against native text could serve as a check that flags normalised, flattened training data.
  • I4 (back): When generating or translating through the meta-world, the stance holder (court vs individual judge) should be carried explicitly instead of left to surface habit.
  • I5 (world): Beliefs in the world model could be attributed to a specific entity (the judge vs the court), so questions like "who holds this view?" can be answered and explained.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Hong Kong Polytechnic UniversityHong Kong · China106 works · 5,190 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksLiterature and Literary Theory · 541 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,379 worksLegal AI · 150 works

Cite

Cite as Yanfang Su, Kanglong Liu and Andrew K. F. Cheung. 2023. Epistemic modality in translated and non-translated English court judgments of Hong Kong: A corpus-based study. The Journal of Specialised Translation (JoSTrans).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.26034/cm.jostrans.2023.525

@article{su2023epistemic,
  title = {{Epistemic modality in translated and non-translated English court judgments of Hong Kong: A corpus-based study}},
  author = {Yanfang Su, Kanglong Liu and Andrew K. F. Cheung},
  journal = {The Journal of Specialised Translation (JoSTrans)},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.26034/cm.jostrans.2023.525},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.26034/cm.jostrans.2023.525}
}

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  56. Data Availability Statement All relevant data in this study are available at https://osf.io/2j8n4/Biography Yanfang Su is currently a PhD student in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include corpus linguistics, corpus-based translation studies, and computer-assisted language learning. She has previously published in linguistic journals such as Language Learning & Technology and System and contributed book chapters on corpus-based translation studies and language learning. ORCID: 0000-0002-4526-4187 E-mail: yanfang.su@connect.polyu.hk Kanglong Liu is Assistant Professor at the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He specialises in corpus-based translation studies and his main interests include empirical approaches to translation studies, translation pedagogy and corpus-based translation research. He is currently Associate Editor of Translation Quarterly, the official publication of the Hong Kong Translation Society. ORCID: 0000-0003-3962-2563 E-mail: kl.liu@polyu.edu.hk Andrew K. F. Cheung is Associate Professor at the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He serves as a member of editorial boards of multiple journals. He is also a member of International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC). His research interests include corpus-based interpreting and translation studies, quality perception of conference interpreting and court interpreting. ORCID: 0000-0003-0848-1980 E-mail: andrew.cheung@polyu.edu.hk Notes 1 For details of the official languages of Hong Kong, their status and use, please refer to the Official Languages Ordinance (https://www.elegislation.gov.hk/hk/cap5). ↗

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