International Technology

CHINA

Tips to Improve Online Research

By Victor Lee

TRADITIONALLY, performing China's legal research is tedious and time-consuming. To read through hundred of thousands of pages of books, newspapers and articles in hope of finding the desired materials is an ordeal to most researchers. There was also a lack of indexing or sorting service readily available in the past.

Besides, the language barrier is a major problem if you are not familiar with Chinese characters, or your computer cannot display them correctly. Luckily, there are online legal content providers emerging to offer legal materials in English, although a great many of them are subscription based, and provide only common law materials.

Even for those familiar with Chinese language, before legal research, you first must figure out what kind of Chinese is being used. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, Chinese traditional (Big 5) characters are used for proper display of information; whereas in mainland China and Singapore, Chinese simplified (GB) characters are the prevailing characters adopted by most Peoples Republic of China (PRC) Web sites.

Downloading the appropriate Chinese characters is important becasue otherwise Web page content may not display properly. Software to support Chinese Big 5 and GB characters can be downloaded from chinese.yahoo.com.

The text of some frequently used laws and regulations is available on governmental Web sites. If your research interests are on the important judicial interpretations and court judgments of the PRC, try the Web sites of the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate. But beware that you can only find Chinese text in those sites.

Online services are available, at a fee, to get the high quality translations of the latest laws in Chinese and English. When you consider purchasing these types of services, you should evaluate the company's search engine, and database. How does the company handle bilingual translations? And look carefully at what support the company has from official governmental authorities.

Victor Lee is manager and associate counsel of isinolaw Ltd., based in Hong Kong.