When the Squid Games came out, its translation was widely criticized as being extremely inadequate, with some going so far as to say the translated version is an entirely different show. One of the vocabulary items criticized was a Korean word that really means something like “boss,” but the show translated simply as “mister.”
Interestingly, Chinese has a word zong (总) that also means something like “boss,” and which is usually translated as “mister” or “Mr.,” and Chinese legal translators doing this are much like the Squid Games translators, providing law firm clients with a version of the case that is totally different from the facts that actually occurred.
Typical Fact Patterns
Whether someone in a corporate or even criminal enterprise case is a “Mister,” “Boss,” or any other appropriate term, such as “Manager,” can be highly relevant under a number of fact patterns. In a recent China related trade secrets case, a judge sitting in court recently pointed to this issue by saying if, in a variety of contexts, a certain executive was acting as an agent for the corporation then this corporation would be guilty of trade secret theft. In the criminal enterprise context, whether someone is perceived as directing the activities of a criminal conspiracy is also relevant to what kind of crime can be charged. In these contexts, if a key actor committing allegedly illegal acts is referred to as a “boss,” a typical jury will perceive his role much differently than if he is simply called “mister.” A typical court is much more likely to consider someone the boss of an organization if they are called a boss. While this seems particularly obvious, keep in mind that almost all translators are removing the boss-related terminology and replacing it with “mister.” The criticized practice is so commonplace that even Google Translate and other machine engines are doing the same thing.
Translators who replace the word “boss” or “manager” when used as a person’s title with the word “mister” are making a deliberate choice. Typically, these translators are non-native speakers of the target language and have little international experience, and objections to these practices often comes from North America. When asked to explain why they believe this is the correct answer, they point to the general principles of translation that the translated document should not seem like a translated document, rather that it should ideally seem as if it is written in its native language. Since they see occupational titles not being used as a form of address in English, they delete it entirely, even if in many cases the occupational title is an essential fact about the person’s identity. There are a few things wrong with this approach.
A first major problem arises from cognitive linguistics. Occupational titles are actually used quite often in English, particularly in the government and military. For example, President Biden of the USA and Administrator Bridenstine of NASA are two managerial titles included in a person’s form of address. Simply because it’s much less common in English than Chinese, it does not mean that a typical reader would not be able to understand what is being said. A big reason why a translation should not “seem” like a translation is the fact that the reader’s cognitive system will not be able to understand language forms not occurring in their language. However, these forms do occur in English and are easily understood to refer to a person’s occupational role. Thus, use of occupational role titles in literature translated by highly qualified Chinese translators is very common.
The second major problem with this approach has to do with skopostheorie, which describes the purpose of the translation. A legal translation is provided for the purpose of completing legal work and documents involving occupational titles, usually in compliance or organized crime cases, are usually being requested and translated because resolving the case requires considering facts shown in those documents. Basically, no legal professional would want a translator to begin deleting facts, especially central facts, so that the document seems “less like a translation.” Indeed, the legal system in general prohibits people from doing that sort of thing. Nonetheless, Chinese legal translators insisting on translating occupational titles as “Mister” provide precisely this as their reason for doing so.
A likely reason that this translation approach became so ubiquitous in East Asia, despite opposition in other parts of the world, is Chinese translators’ very limited English vocabularies and limited contact with English-speaking populations. The typical Chinese translator may have an English vocabulary of about 10,000 words, while a highly educated native speaker might know about 50,000 words. Lacking knowledge about how occupational titles are used in English — a fairly advanced topic not covered in a 4-year English degree — the Chinese translator community was able to reach a largely ignorance-based consensus that occupational titles are unknown to the English-speaking world, thus began deleting this content from their translations.
While common in the industry, this kind of translation approach was so problematic for US government agencies that they had to take steps to stop translators from deleting this data. In particular, if you look at how public releases from the US Department of Justice and the FBI describe cases involving occupational titles in Mandarin Chinese conversations, you will notice that many titles are kept, and even in such a way that is absurdly literal. For example, the word Laoshi when applied to managers is translated as “teacher” when the manager is obviously not a teacher, but the word is being used as an honorific to describe someone who is a “Master” of a field of knowledge and therefore worthy of learning from. While the government’s translations don’t make much logical sense, you can at least appreciate the federal government’s intent to avoid destruction of possibly relevant occupational titles appearing in court documents.
In the spirit of Western law as compared with Eastern practices, this kind of practice would be tantamount to destruction of evidence. In the Western legal system, the evidence provided to a court must be complete and totally accurate, and any deviation from the truth is taken extremely seriously. Much of this is rooted in Western tradition. In East Asia, however, altering the facts and presenting falsehoods in the legal process is not something that I have noticed legal translators or interpreters taking seriously. Dan Harris at the China Law Blog also commented on his experience where an interpreter deliberately removed key facts from a case because the interpreter felt it would be “embarrassing.” While lawyers seem to understand the importance of truth in the legal proceedings, translators are nonetheless remarkably willing to completely sacrifice key legal facts to pursue highly trivial goals that none of the case participants care about.
This is, however, not to say that the Chinese legal documents should be translated in an ultra-literal way that adds up to a kind of “word salad” that nobody can understand. When translating a legal document, it’s essential that the reader is able to understand what the source language document is actually talking about. The general readability, idiomaticity, and the vocabulary used, while being in tension with each other element, are all means by which the reader’s understanding of the document can be achieved. If a 1% improvement in the idiomaticity in the document comes at the cost of 100% of the legally relevant facts shown on that document, then the translator is making a bad trade-off. When translating legal documents, it’s essential to keep in mind that the reader needs to be able to understand what the document is talking about, and translators who delete essential information simply to sound a bit more idiomatic are doing the client no favors.
