U.S. Court of Appeals Sets High Bar for Legal Translation

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit’s deference to China’s interpretation of its own law in a recent judgment (In Re: Vitamin C Antitrust Litigation; Sept. 20, 2016) has multiple implications.  First is the implication this decision clearly has for global legal practice.  This topic, together with others, will be explored in our forthcoming seminars in Beijing (Nov. 22) and Hong Kong (Nov. 24) (sign up for free admission by following the link below OR here).

Another implication of this decision is that there will be higher expectations for legal translations, or else much of China’s interpretations of its own laws will be lost in poor translations.  To reach this high bar, the China Guiding Cases Project (“CGCP”) of Stanford Law School has continued to fine-tune its translations of complex Chinese legal principles, as reflected in the following newly released products:

Guiding Case Nos. 53 and 54 feature as key concepts the terms 担保 (guarantee), 保证 (guarantee??), and 担保保证金 (guarantee guarantee money??).  Check out how we solve these brain teasers to carefully distinguish these important Chinese legal terms (see GC53 and GC54).

Guiding Case No. 55 (a utility model patent infringement dispute) and Guiding Case No. 56 (a case of objections to jurisdiction in a product liability dispute) articulate important principles to guide subsequent courts’ adjudication of similar cases.  The CGCP presents clear translations of these principles for legal professionals and other experts:

• GC55: The scope of protection of a patent should be clear.  If there is an obvious flaw in the statements of a utility model patent claim and the specific meaning of the technical terms in the claim [still] cannot be determined by combining the specification of the patent involved in a case, attached figures, common knowledge in the art, relevant existing technology, etc., resulting in the scope of protection of the patent being obviously unclear, then [a people’s court] cannot determine that the allegedly infringing technical solution constitutes an infringement of rights because there is no way to conduct a substantively meaningful infringement comparison [of the claim] with the allegedly infringing technical solution.
• GC56: Where a party did not raise an objection to jurisdiction during the first-instance reply submission period [of a case], [but] raises an objection to jurisdiction either during the second-instance adjudication [of the case] or during a retrial [when the case is] remanded for retrial, [the objection] shall not be reviewed by a people’s court.

If you like our work and want to learn more, we invite you to attend our upcoming seminars in Beijing and Hong Kong, which will be our first in Asia.  The full list of speakers and program for each seminar is included below.  Seats are filling up quickly, so please sign up soon!

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