Legal Writing Lab.
Learn · Australian legal English

Legal English for Mandarin speakers: the transfer errors

Start with the fact that changes how you practise: the errors Mandarin speakers make in English legal writing are not random, and they are not carelessness. They are systematic transfers from a grammar that solves the same problems differently. Mandarin is not a simpler language than English; it spends its complexity elsewhere. But that means the English errors it produces are predictable, and predictable errors can be hunted deliberately instead of feared generally. This page maps the five transfers that matter most in legal writing, and gives each one a check you can run on your own drafts.

1. Articles: the decision Mandarin never asks you to make

Mandarin has no articles. Definiteness is carried by word order, by demonstratives like 这 and 那, and by context, so nothing in your first language rings an alarm when an English "the" is missing. In legal writing the alarm needs to ring roughly sixty times a page: "the plaintiff", "a contract" on first mention and "the contract" ever after, no article at all on doctrinal concepts like consideration and negligence.

This is the single highest-volume transfer error, and it has its own full page with the rules in priority order: Articles (a, an, the) in Australian legal writing. The Mandarin-specific advice is about method: because no instinct will warn you, articles must be a separate proofreading pass, run on every assignment, checking the small set of nouns legal writing uses most.

2. Plurals: in Mandarin, number lives outside the noun

A Mandarin noun does not change form for number: 三份合同 (sān fèn hétong, three contracts) carries the plural in the numeral and the measure word while 合同 stays unchanged. English puts number on the noun itself, and legal English punishes the slip because so many of its plurals are load-bearing:

The paired error is subject-verb agreement, because Mandarin verbs are also invariant: "the court holds", "the parties agree", "the respondent denies". A missing third-person "s" is small, but in a memorandum it is visible in the first line it touches.

3. Tense: aspect is not tense

Mandarin marks how an action relates to completion or experience (了, 过, 在), not when it happened relative to now. English forces a tense choice on every verb, and legal writing then adds a convention on top: past tense for the facts and for what a court did ("the court dismissed the appeal", 法院驳回了上诉), present tense for propositions of current law ("the rule requires clear words"). The transfer error is tense drift: a paragraph that moves between past and present with no legal reason. The fix is mechanical and works: one proofreading pass reading only the verbs, asking of each one "is this reporting an event, or stating the law?"

4. Countability: the legal nouns that never take a plural

English divides nouns into countable and uncountable, and legal English concentrates an unusual number of uncountable nouns in exactly the places you write most:

Mandarin does not mark countability on the noun, so nothing transfers to warn you. The practical move is to learn this short list as vocabulary, the same way you learned the words themselves. Note the near-miss pair: authority is uncountable when it means power ("the tribunal lacked authority") but countable when it means a cited case ("the leading authorities").

5. Sentence shape: topic first is not subject first

Mandarin is comfortable opening a sentence with the topic and commenting on it: 这个合同，责任很清楚 (this contract, the liability is very clear). Transferred into English, this produces the dangling topic: "This contract, the liability of the parties is clear." English legal writing requires a grammatical subject doing a verb: "This contract allocates liability clearly" or "Under this contract, the parties' liability is clear." When you find a comma splice or a floating noun phrase at the start of your sentence, the repair is almost always to promote something to subject and give it a real verb.

Bonus transfer: the collocations that do not survive translation

Word-for-word translation of a Mandarin legal phrase often lands one register away from the English convention. The clearest example: 违反 (wéifǎn) covers both contracts and statutes, but Australian legal English splits the verb by object. You breach a contract or a duty; you contravene a statutory provision; "violate" reads as rights talk or American usage. The full pattern, with a table of the pairings Australian legal writing expects, is at Legal English collocations.

A Mandarin-specific self-check

Run these five passes on your next assignment, in this order, about two minutes each:

  1. Articles: check every instance of party names, court, contract, and the doctrine nouns. The full checklist is on the articles page.
  2. Number: every plural context, and every third-person singular verb. Read for "s".
  3. Verbs: event or law? Past for events, present for current law, no drift inside a paragraph.
  4. The uncountable five: search your draft for evidence, information, advice, legislation, case law. No plural forms, no "a" in front.
  5. Sentence openings: any sentence that starts with a noun phrase followed by a comma gets checked for a real subject and verb.

Twenty minutes, and it targets exactly the errors your first language predicts, which is a far better use of proofreading time than reading the whole draft one more time and hoping.

If you would like this kind of checking done with you rather than by you alone, Legal Writing Lab is a free feedback tool for international law students writing Australian legal English. It flags the issues in your draft, explains the rule behind each one with notes that account for your first language, and never writes your work for you.