Law and language: issues related to legal translation and interpretation of Chinese rules on tortious liability of environmental pollution

The history of Chinese modern legal development—and of the knowledge of this process by foreigners—is also a history of issues of inter-lingual communications. Today, in a world of growing legal contaminations, a higher level of attention and care should be devoted to these issues. This paper will start exploring such issues focusing on rules on liability for environmental pollution provided for in the 2009 Tort law. These rules offer interesting perspectives of observation on this matter, belonging to one of the most ground-breaking law sectors in global law and, at the same time, being deeply interwoven into the taxonomy and the basic legal concepts of the private and procedural law systems that, since the last century, China has been framing on the basis of Western legal tradition models. Problems in legal translations of law provisions and in interpretations of the general categories and principles referred to by statutory rules will be raised and analysed.