DOI: https://doi.org/10.14710/parole.v16i2.91-103

The Paradox of Equivalence: Challenges in Translating Indonesian Criminal Law Documents for Chinese-Speaking Defendants

1Beijing Foreign Study University, China

2Universitas Negeri Jakarta, Indonesia

3Program Studi Bahasa Mandarin dan Kebudayaan Tiongkok, Indonesia

4 Jinan University, China

5 Fatima Jinnah Women University, Pakistan

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Received: 16 Jul 2026; Revised: 11 Sep 2026; Accepted: 8 Oct 2026; Available online: 26 Oct 2026; Published: 1 Oct 2026.
Open Access Copyright (c) 2026 Sheyra Silvia Siregar, Ria Riski Marsuki, Aiza Ghafoor under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0.

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Abstract
The increasing number of multilingual criminal proceedings has highlighted the importance of accurate legal translation in safeguarding procedural fairness for foreign defendants. In Indonesia, Chinese-speaking defendants rely heavily on translated Berita Acara Pemeriksaan (Police Examination Reports, BAP), making conceptual equivalence essential for ensuring accurate legal communication throughout criminal investigations. This study examines the equivalence of Indonesian–Mandarin translations of BAP documents by integrating Legal Translation Theory, Dynamic Equivalence, and Forensic Linguistics. A convergent parallel mixed-methods design was employed, combining comparative analysis of a bilingual corpus with questionnaire data collected from legal practitioners, including judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers, and court interpreters. The analysis identified three major sources of translation nonequivalence: legal terminology embedded in different legal systems, syntactic restructuring that altered procedural relationships, and semantic shifts affecting the interpretation of institutional concepts. These translation problems indicate that lexical correspondence alone is insufficient for preserving legal meaning across Indonesian and Chinese criminal justice systems. The findings demonstrate that legal translation should be evaluated according to conceptual and functional equivalence rather than literal linguistic similarity. This study contributes to legal translation and forensic linguistics by providing an interdisciplinary framework for assessing translation quality in criminal procedural documents and offers practical implications for improving legal interpreter training and multilingual judicial communication.

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Keywords: legal translation; forensic linguistics; dynamic equivalence; Police Examination Report (BAP); procedural justice; Indonesian–Mandarin translation.

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Section: Research Article
Language : EN
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