Comparison of Judgment Document Information Between China and Russia Based on Corpus

Abstract

The study of legal comparisons has become particularly important as the number of foreign-related legal disputes has increased dramatically with the growing number of cross-border trade. This study discovers the differences and similarities between Chinese and Russian judgment documents and provides a linguistic basis for the academic theoretical researches and the call for linguists to enter the courtrooms by establishing a corpus of Chinese and Russian judgement documents, quantifying and analysing the Chinese and Russian judgement documents based on the Legal Discourse Information Theory. It can be found that the macro-structure of civil ruling documents is clearer but does not provide more micro-information. By adding language elements, it can be seen that there are more information points and information components in Russian criminal judgment documents. The information points in Chinese civil judgment documents are more concentrated than in Russian civil judgment documents, while they are more similar in terms of the proportion and type of information components.