Unethical labor practices dominate the industry because the majority of translation today is not provided by translators directly working in partnerships or cooperatives, but rather by translation outsourcers. Most of the big outsourcers subcontract their work to other outsourcers, and labor management organizations in China are widely known for their unethical labor practices. These labor practices, described below, only provide the illusion of effective control. In reality, translators have effectively deployed cheating to “outsmart” these organizations, providing faked translations in order to earn a living wage.
Payment Practices
The use of unethical labor practices is proliferated throughout the translation industry in general, to the point where there is an entire website database devoted to cataloging whether certain translation companies use unethical payment practices for translators. The situation in Chinese translation specifically is actually quite comparable to the situation seen with migrant farm workers, who are taken advantage of in the Southwestern United States because of their lack of English proficiency and limited ability to enforce their legal rights. Unethical labor practices are largely used in the global translation industry because there is no labor regulation for translation; translation is mainly done by freelancers and is priced per word, falling outside the scope of typical labor regulation. In my opinion, 99% of so-called “Chinglish” can be blamed on the use of unethical labor practices with Chinese translators who, lacking any kind of labor negotiating power, instead resort to work falsification.
The most common unethical labor practice used in Chinese translation is unreasonable payment delaying tactics. Most workers in the United States are used to being paid bi-weekly and promptly. When it comes to translation, these same companies often delay payments for up to five or six months. For example, a Shanghai-based translation company made blacklists recently by using the pandemic as an excuse to delay payments. Its typical policy was to make payments only 45 days after receiving a correct invoice for the amounts, and it extended the delays another 60 days on account of the pandemic. Since the company subcontracts for many big translation companies, corporations in New York can expect retaliatory work falsification to result from angered translators. These two delaying tactics are in part motivated by the project manager and accounting staff’s “do it later” attitude, where higher-priority tasks or things seen as more important (for example, pitching at conferences) are given higher priority than clearing a payments backlog.
The first two payment delaying tactics are not related to whether a client has paid or not; the company will delay payment by 45 days even if the client had prepaid. Not because it needs to, but because it has a good excuse. Other translation companies use a tactic similar to those used by Chinese construction companies employing migrant workers. If the client has not paid, the workers do not get paid either. A client who refuses to pay or demands a discount generally results in translator payments being docked. The reason the client is angry may be because the project manager gave the client an unrealistic expectation to close the sale. For example, a client may say that they need an expert in Wills & Estates, and the project manager then finds an “expert” who, in reality, is an advertising translator who translated a holographic will without complaint once. The advertising translator isn’t told that the project manager misrepresented their qualifications and, when the risk doesn’t pay off for the project manager, the translator is called upon to serve as an insurance company for the project manager.
I went out and asked many translators in China about how they react to these payment practices, and the answer was uniformly not through scorched earth practices, but rather through the kind of surgical strike you’d expect from a laser-guided missile. For anything unethical a translation agency does on behalf of a client, the Chinese translator will get their pound of flesh—tenfold. If the translation company steals $100 from the Chinese translator, then the Chinese translator will steal $100 back from the agency, and that $100 becomes $200 of translation costs. Legal translation clients should expect an optimal minimum of at least 500% ROI, so they ultimately lose out on about $1,000. At the end of it all, the Chinese translator will not lose a penny to unethical labor practices because they see the translation agency retained by the client as “fair game.” Clients are the ones who have value stolen from them in the form of reduced quality, but they are typically unaware any of this is happening behind the scenes.
Inquiry Bombardment
A unique business relationship practice described in China is described as a “tai chi” between a buyer and seller going back and forth, where the buyer complains of defects and the seller denies this or puts the blame back on the buyer. In Chinese translation specifically, this manifests as a practice I call “inquiry bombardment.” Local Chinese corporate employees will do this, which is a very good argument for not having local employees responsible for overseeing the translation process. Many translation agencies also practice the process of tai chi and bombard their translators with inquiries.
The Chinese translator, after having worked hard on a project and earning a fair rate, is sometimes surprised to get a reply from a client with a hundred or more inquiries demanding that the translator explain why a particular translation is correct. By the time the inquiries are answered, a local translator in China earning $7.50 an hour will be down to about $3 per hour. A lot of these inquiries will be highly trivial and boil down to “explain why my high school understanding of English is wrong and why your decades of specialization in this field are correct.” The practice is analogous to going to a doctor’s appointment and then demanding that the doctor spend an hour explaining the biochemistry behind a prescribed medicine in detail. The wrinkle here is that the translation agency will refuse to pay the translator until everything is explained. Under Chinese law, this is illegal and translators can sue for it as they can elsewhere, and there is European Union precedent where translators have sued successfully. However, much like migrant workers, translators generally don’t understand their legal rights—even “legal translators,” whose credentials are usually misrepresented by agencies.
Translators in China say they have developed effective countermeasures to fight back, even if not through the law. The first step the translator takes is to cut time investment in the project for their client in half by using automation tools where the client may lack the ability to audit and verify the correctness of the translation. When the client responds with bombardment, the remaining half of the budgeted time is used for providing rationales and justifications for what the translator knows is an incorrect translation. Typically, the explanations are highly phony; after all, the translator is trying to justify why something churned out of a machine translator is true and reliable. These phony explanations work with translation outsourcers because the typical translation is ordered as-is: without any warranties and with no standards, aside from subjective satisfaction which is legally meaningless. Translators in Europe who have sued on this basis for non-payment have won. Since no particular methodology is endorsed, the translation company is simply selling some person’s subjective opinion. These phony explanations not only are accepted most of the time, but they can even stand up in court.
Illogical Rate Setting
The translation rates in China are usually set at the lowest levels seen anywhere in the world, less than half of most other developing countries’ languages. Since most Chinese to English translation work from big translation companies is subcontracted to these same Chinese companies, the translation rate for work relied on by even highly paid wall street lawyers is illogical. In my own experience, I remember frequently being in conference rooms in New York with $500/hour lawyers struggling to figure out what pure Chinglish meant when referring to the conduct of investment banks on incredibly high-stakes matters. For the top partner billing $1,300 an hour, those junior attorneys’ memorandums were based on a completely fictional account of what a China subsidiary was up to. Often, I had to take the initiative to explain that some of this Chinglish meant the exact opposite of what the translation said. To this day, it still blows my mind that corporations would spend $10,000 to have attorneys analyze a totally fictional account of the corporation’s activity.
The logic of the translation company on the ground in China working for those law firms should trigger serious cognitive dissonance. On one hand, they firmly believe that the translation should proceed at 250 words per hour and, in fact, the time budget formulas the local project managers use generally use a linear formula that assumes somewhere between 200 and 300 words per hour will be completed. Simultaneously, they offer 30RMB per 1000 words. So, the translator is paid 30RMB for every 4 hours, a total of $4.45 or $1.11 per hour, which is around one-third of minimum wage in China. To put it in other terms, beggars and the freelance recyclers who pick through dumpster garbage get paid more than what these companies think they are paying. One of my friends is the CEO of a dumpster garbage repurposing company, and the people hunting garbage for them are usually migrant farmers with less than a middle school education living in bathroom-sized homes. Translators in China usually have a bachelor’s degree, and half have a master’s, so a project manager who thinks they can get a master’s degree holder for a third of the hourly rate of a garbage sorter is living in total fantasy. In practice, competition for low-pay translation work is secretarial jobs.
When I asked executives hanging around at translation conferences working at some of these outsourcers in China whether they knew this sort of thing was going on quite rampantly, they uniformly denied even the remotest possibility this could happen. After all, the contracts clearly prohibit it. The problem is, Chinese Contract Law doesn’t prohibit it at all. I asked judges around China how they would rule on a case where a translator sells confidential corporate information in exchange for free automation services, in violation of a contract, and the judges responded that if they thought that’s what it takes to earn at least minimum wage, then the provisions of the translation outsourcer contract—including the NDAs and trade secrets—are inapplicable.
So, if you are a New York attorney with a big-name translation company handling sensitive company secrets and you think your contract protects it, you’re living in a fantasy land. If you contract to pay $1.10/hour to those translators—even unintentionally through an outsourcer—then your contract impliedly sells client data in order to get those low prices. A failure by an attorney hiring a translation company to verify what the actual translator is earning is essentially their agreement to sell their privileged and confidential client data to Baidu and, by extension, any competitor subscribing to Baidu’s document resale or data exchange services.
Racial Hierarchies
A final unethical practice is the racial and ethnic hierarchies used by the translation companies, usually in Asia, where the actual work is being done. Translation outsourcers generally lack effective means by which to assess the skill of their translators, so they wind up relying on categorizing their labor force according to ethnicity. The New York Times first described this general practice in its expose about nail salons in New York, The Price of Nice Nails. The Times reported that “a rigid racial and ethnic caste system reigns in modern-day New York City, dictating not only pay but also how workers are treated.” The relevant investigation findings here are that the nail salons created a hierarchy of Koreans above Chinese, above Hispanics. The same also occurs in translation.
My first encounter with this situation was with a government staffing agent for Hong Kong, who explained that Hong Kong nationals educated abroad are on the top rung, followed by those educated in Hong Kong, then Taiwan and Macau nationals, finally followed by Mainland Chinese. Quite remarkably, before around 2015—when Chinese companies attempted and failed catastrophically to enter Western markets, such as with the launch of WeChat North America and TMall North America—white and Hispanic translators were also placed on a rung below Hong Kong and even Mainland Chinese translators. The staffing agent, along with many people I encounter today, had a very strong and well-defined racial role for Caucasians, which they believed to be that of the English teacher. This is a big topic for a future article, but John Pasden’s writing on so-called “Language Power Struggles” to stop Caucasians from speaking Chinese is a fascinating read.
Following the Chinese international brand launch Localization Catastrophe of 2015, a new racial category emerged for Chinese to English translation, that of the “Native Speaker.” At a translation event, a famous translator once told me, “You get paid more because you are a native speaker.” (using English for “Native Speaker”). The new racial category seems to have emerged when angry translation clients began pointing out obviously “non-native,” i.e., Chinglish, production. During the work leading up to the Localization Catastrophe, big Chinese companies would actually assign a native Chinese supervisor to native English-speaking translators, who would then be scolded for not using correct Chinglish.
A broader phenomenon is categorizing ordinary Chinese people into various sub-ethnic categories, such as Hong Konger or Taiwanese, and sub-sub-ethnic categories like “ABC” or “Returnees” (haigui). A more intermediate category, the 1.5 generation who went abroad at middle school age receives very little industry attention. For example, an ABC will be valued higher than a local, but lower than a Caucasian “native speaker”—a situation not unlike that observed in the English teaching industry. None of this has anything to do with skill. There are college students in mainland China who have never been abroad, yet their English is superior to US degree holders. The reason is that some of the “Returnees” are unmotivated rich kids; the prodigy in China is the Anglophile. Local translation outsourcers can’t really tell who is any good, and therefore sort prices by ethnicity. The unmotivated rich kid goes on to provide expensive Chinglish, and the Anglophile’s perfect English is corrected into Chinglish by a more senior translator.
Conclusion
Translation clients should take steps to prevent the use of unethical labor practices when purchasing translation services. Many big corporations with supply chains feel that they lack control over whether unethical labor practices are used. For example, many businesses in the garment industry feel it’s impossible to know if a subcontractor violated labor standards, which isn’t really the case in translation. Chinese translation companies are often accused of using unethical labor practices, generally mirroring the situation of migrant laborers like construction or factory workers. However, these translators are not migrant laborers, and they are very clever at sabotaging work quality to cut costs on their own end whenever they feel they are being treated unfairly. The notion that the company is exerting control when using unethical practices is an absolute fantasy often believed by managers who, in reality, are outwitted by translators. Businesses can only succeed with Chinese translation by forming cooperative, productive, and win-win relationships with their translators.
