姚迪文 訴 曾永康及永亨銀行

HCA 2757/99

IN THE HIGH COURT OF THE

HONG KONG SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION

COURT OF FIRST INSTANCE

ACTION NO. 2757 OF 1999

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D E C I S I O N

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1. This is an application under the High Court Civil Procedure (Use of Language) Rules of the Official Languages Ordinance Cap. 5.

2. The application is made under Rule 5 which provides at rr. (1) that a party to any proceedings who (a) is served with a document in an official language with which he is not familiar, and (b) is familiar with the other official language, may request the party to the proceedings serving the document to provide him with a translation of the document in the other official language.

3. Before me today, Miss So, for the Defendant has indicated that the Defendant is prepared to provide translations of the three affirmations in support of the Defendant's application to strike out the Statement of Claim, but she indicated that the Defendant was not prepared to provide translations of the exhibits.

4. These exhibits can be divided into three categories. The first category is (according to Miss So) in the majority documents used in a previous action, namely High Court Action No. A6138/92 where the Plaintiff was legally represented. The second category are bilingual documents and the third category are transcripts of the evidence in that previous High Court Action.

5. In my view, the Defendant is not required to provide translations of bilingual documents. Ex facie bilingual documents are in both official languages, and therefore, the Plaintiff would be able to read the contents of the documents in the Chinese language.

6. In relation to the documents used in the previous action, whilst I accept that the Plaintiff was legally represented in the previous action, he may not have been as familiar with those documents as he would now wish to be, since he is now no longer legally represented, and therefore, I consider that it would only be fair to him to be provided with translations of those documents.

7. As for the third category, transcripts of the evidence, the evidence taken in that previous action was in Chinese. Therefore, it would seem to me that the most expedient and direct way of dealing with this is to provide the parties with copies of the audio tapes of the evidence given, so that the parties could actually hear directly the evidence given in Chinese, instead of providing a translation in Chinese of the English transcript which was made from translations of the evidence given in Chinese.

8. In relation to those documents which I have ordered to be provided, I would order that translations of these documents be provided by the Defendant to the Plaintiff by 5:00 p.m. on 24th September 1999 which would provide the Plaintiff with more than one clear week in which to prepare his evidence in opposition to the Plaintiff's application to strike out which is due to be heard on 4th October.