Dr Ca****
Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region 1990 also provides that Chinese and English may be used as official languages by the executive authorities, legislature and judiciary. The new law also provided a mechanism for translating and publishing authentic texts in Chinese of statutes enacted in English, and the Chinese translated texts went through the formal legislative process of authentication. Since then, Hong Kong statute law has become fully bilingual. Now both the English and Chinese statutory texts in Hong Kong are equally authentic, that is, both have equal legal force. The Chinese legislative text is neither subordinate to nor a mere translation of its English counterpart, despite the fact that the laws were first enacted in English, and the Chinese texts were their translation (see Lu 2004). Today, in Hong Kong, there are two types of bilingual laws: the earlier laws that were enacted first in English and subsequently translated into Chinese and went through the a