Why Chinese Translators Reject Native English

Many native English-speaking readers ask me why English translations produced in China are so universally incomprehensible. In this article, my primary aim is to pull back the curtain and provide some insights as to why there are so many bad translations. My answer to this common question is that the Chinese translation community rejects the opinions of native English speakers on translations. I am not taking aim at obviously fraudulent translations, but instead want to explain the ubiquity of “high quality” Chinglish, which has been pointed out by scholars such as Victor Mair, who suggest that is a kind of “Non-English” he labels variously as “Zhonglish” or “Xinhua English.” Wikipedia’s page on Chinglish provides a helpful summary of the phenomenon, and provides helpful annotations to Mair’s observations:

“Some peculiar Chinese English cannot be labeled Chinglish because it is grammatically correct, and Victor Mair calls this emerging dialect “Xinhua English or New China News English,” based on the Xinhua News Agency. Take for instance this headline: “China lodges solemn representation over Japan’s permission for Rebiya Kadeer’s visit”. This unusual English phrase literally translates the original Chinese tíchū yánzhèng jiāoshè (提出嚴正交涉; ‘lodge solemn representation’), combining tíchū ”put forward; raise; pose; bring up”, yánzhèng ”serious; stern; unyielding; solemn”, and jiāoshè ”mutual relations; negotiation; representation.”

From the perspective of a professional translator, the essence of the problem highlighted by Mair and other observers is that the translator invented a phrase the reader cannot accurately comprehend or even “unpack,” and this phrase made it through quality assurance, into publication, and adopted as a universal and mandatory standard to be used by all translators after being published. The translation produced is useless to readers. How does an obviously useless translation become a standard? When I looked deeper into the matter, I found that translators are rejecting the opinions of native English speakers to silence disagreement.

Native Speakers Rejected

The psychological force driving the creation of “Chinglish” is probably not much different from “Euro English” or other translator-invented sham English variants, simply made extreme by the difficulty of the Chinese-to-English translation task. Groupthink, described briefly by Encyclopedia Britannica as a “mode of thinking in which individual members of small cohesive groups tend to accept a viewpoint or conclusion that represents a perceived group consensus,” is the primary driver of the creation of the translator-invented English dialect (i.e., Zhonglish) and explains why phrases such as “lodge solemn representations” are reproduced tens of thousands of times without a reader having ever truly understood it.

The acute manifestation of the groupthink phenomenon is that very few Chinese to English translations involve a native English speaker at all. For example, I heard a retired legislative translator at a conference opine that native English-speaking law experts cannot be involved because they cannot understand Chinese culture. Numerous well-intentioned native English-speaking editors traveling to China to offer editing services have also confided that the clients they work for routinely criticize and reject their work. Looking at the breadth of English documents published in China, one can see that only a tiny fraction have apparently invited the expertise of native speakers. I have also seen social media stories shared about how native English editors “broke” translations, which is an overwhelming comment shared by most translators in my experience with local translators in the PRC. These organizations are producing unintelligible English because they have, through groupthink, reached a quiet consensus that the native English is “broken.”

Origins of Translator Groupthink

Groupthink within the Chinese translation community, like in other communities, has a history tracing back to the tribal mentality of the stone age. When the stone age Chinese precursor civilization tribes settled the Tibetan Plateau millennia ago, each tribe developed its unique customs which it characterized as good, and differences seen in outside tribes were rejected and discriminated against. In modern China, in-group biases originating from these ancient customs can be seen in the campaigns against foreign “spiritual pollution.” Translators exclude opinions from native English experts by saying they cannot understand China. They never stop to consider that ignorance of China is inevitable if all translation continues to be inherently incomprehensible.

The insular tribal instincts inherited from our ancestors do not fully explain the phenomena, or else these problems would be much more apparent throughout the world. Another key factor is that the empirical decisional model used by translators does not consider science at all, but is instead dominated by personal opinion. Translators rarely possess a basic education in an evidence-based profession such as law, engineering, or even linguistics, but rather in English literature, where criticism quite legitimately revolves around personal opinion. Thus, while I know many outstanding Chinese scientists with a clear head for objective evidence, students I train for legal translation have no exposure to the concept of evidence. This slanted personal training through interactions with traditional customs creates an extreme situation I call the “cult of personal opinion,” related to the cult of personality phenomenon, and results in translators’ blind obeisance to unverified personal opinion. This cult of personal opinion begins worshiping a non-native opinion on English and aggressively attacks native English opinion.

The ideology of translators working in a groupthink environment is not the ideology of the scientific method, but rather simply defaults to traditional collectivist or authoritarian social norms. A good example of this situation is when other translators message me and ask me for my personal opinion on some highly important translation item saying I am an “authority” on this particular kind of translation. I usually reply by asking them to collect all the relevant evidence on the usage of the source term, in addition to that of possible terminology candidates. Their expectation is that I’ll just come up with something off the top of my head, and they’ll paste it into the translation, and indeed the asker usually tries to circumvent the evidence-gathering process for the terminology item. From my perspective, the terminology item is either one without a desired universal one-size-fits-all translation, or is one that is highly specialized and where the target English term is likely something that even a typical American lawyer has never heard of. Apparently, most “authorities” put in this position just make something up, and this is where sham terms like “lodge solemn representations” come from. Lacking a science-based education, these English majors are defaulting to ancient cultural practices.

Anthropologist Fei Xiaotong wrote a famous study titled Xiangtu Zhongguo about the traditional cultural practices in rural China. Pertinently, Fei points out that when faced with a difficult problem, instead of empirically solving a problem (typically related to growing rice) traditional Chinese communities would begin looking to identify an authority figure and get his personal opinion on it. This works fine for subsistence farmers, but Fei pointed out that students arriving at a university should be exploring solutions to new problems, not simply memorizing an authority figure’s personal opinion. In the preceding paragraph, I could indeed just tell people the first answer that pops into my head, like an interpreter would, but that may not be the best or most precise interpretation of the difficult term. Yet this is what many people put on the pedestal of translation “authority” actually do. Young translators have even suggested it is rude or unreasonable that I not just provide a quick personal opinion, but instead want to spend time looking for the correct answer. But there are many people who relish the idea of being a venerated sage of translation, issuing dozens of unverified personal opinions per day. When the native English editor is brought in to help with these translations, they are likely to get attacked or at best marginalized, simply because they disagree with Mandarin native translators’ perspectives on English.

To better understand this absurd result, let’s put the three groupthink factors above together and see how it plays out in practice. Due to their lack of evidence-based or scientific education, the English majors are only prepared to reason from personal opinion, which makes literature a field highly susceptible to the cult of personality phenomenon. They also default to the traditional culture where authorities are emphasized and create authority-figure roles among the native Chinese-speaking community. This community, and these translation teams, develop an insular tribal mindset. When the native speaker comes halfway around the world and suddenly challenges the opinion of a venerated authority, the modern-day “tribe” closes ranks with its in-group and forms a majority that rejects the isolated outsider’s opinion. They also begin developing rationalizations for the exclusion. For example, they might justify themselves by saying that the outsider does not understand China sufficiently or, more cleverly, that the native English expressions “do not mean the exact same thing as” things like “lodge solemn representations.”

Moreover, while state media translations are the most visible, I have observed that almost no organization truly escapes these phenomena because the translator talent pool and translator training methods are generally uniform. When the US federal government falsely arrests innocent Chinese citizens, or there is a giant corporate scandal like the poisoned milk incident, I usually see these internal translators still following the same authority-driven mindset Fei Xiaotong criticized.

Defeating Groupthink

Two effective strategies when combined can effectively defeat groupthink. First, translator education and training itself, and the requirements of the organization using translations, need to view language itself as something described by linguistics (a science) and not a mere matter of personal opinion. A great deal of scientific research into linguistics has been done to describe how meaning is created through language, and an entire journal on Language and the Law has been formed. A pertinent example of this is translating the Chinese word shenpi. Chinese is grammar-light but contracts lots of words, and translators reverse the contraction when translating to English. Shenpi is usually translated into dense phrases like “review and approval organ.”

In English, the translator is actually talking about a government agency with jurisdiction to approve an application. In my experience with administrative law, we’d simply say something like the “approving agency.” When an administrative law expert goes to China and wants to use that expression, the translators will generally attack the expert and attempt to remove them from the project or at least reject their changes. Their reason is that the word shenpi is a contraction of “review and approval” and in their personal opinion, you need all three words. However, when the English itself is inspected and you look at what the term the American administrative law expert wants to use, you do indeed see that a subdivision of government is an “agency”, and for a government agency to approve an application their review of the application is necessarily implied. This way of thinking has to be self-motivated by the organization however; in general, a groupthink-driven translation team will reject almost all evidence that contradicts its own opinion.

Another good strategy was raised by Yale scholar Jeremy Daum previously at translation conferences and is one that can be used by any organization. His suggestion is quite simple: the translator, when working with subject matter experts native in English, should provide a detailed explanation to the subject matter expert so that an accurate understanding of the source Chinese term can be found quickly. This strategy is actually very difficult for translators to use, because translators learning to translate from Chinese to English develop a pattern of behavior where if asked to explain what a word means, can rarely provide an answer more than one or two words long. In practice, a one-word “explanation” of a Chinese legal term is no different from a one-word translation, I would say they are one and the same. A brief overview of a legal concept in textbooks will generally run over 50 words, and an encyclopedia article should be over one thousand words. If your organization is tolerating translators giving subject matter experts one word “explanations,” they are being permitted to sabotage the work of these experts.

Conclusion

The ubiquitous bad English translations from Chinese sources seen at even very prestigious organizations are not a matter of language incompetence, but rather are created through a process of institutionalized groupthink. Specifically, translators develop an insular, tribal mindset and begin creating false authorities among themselves that cannot accept things like an expert or native speaker’s opinion.