Against Authoritative Chinese Translations

Blind obedience to authoritative translations is the cause of most of the troubles faced by Chinese to English legal translators. Many translators talk about the employability crisis and dwindling pay rates facing the industry as an objective phenomenon outside of their control. From an economic perspective, this is not rational: if these translators were capable of producing work of value, then clients would recognize this value and therefore pay fairly for their work. These translators are unable to earn more than meager pay rates because their work does not create value, the reason being that their work focuses primarily on blindly following “authoritative” references in the field that recommend incorrect answers which, When applied to real-world situations, results in translations achieving bad results for the client.

Unemployable Translators

“Authority” driven Chinese to English translation is destroying value, not creating it. The most convincing evidence of this phenomenon comes from not only what dozens of young people in the industry have told me, but also the statistics on translator compensation. If you look at translation rates paid to Chinese translators, they are almost uniformly much lower than rates paid to translators in not only wealthy countries like Europe, but also in countries less wealthy than China in Latin America and Africa. In addition to substantial anecdotal evidence and claims by industry insiders, this indicates that the translations being produced are not creating significant value on their own. Translators in this language are in general so undervalued in China businesses, that at the several translation programs I visited, all of the students I encountered indicated an expectation to work in a non-translation job, citing pay as the key reason. Highly-paid translators do exist, but the quality of their work is excellent. I believe that translators earning subsistence wages do so because they cannot create meaningful, value-adding work.

Excessive reliance on authority drives these poverty outcomes. Respected and well-paid professions are generally evidence-based, such as lawyers, doctors, engineers, and scientists. The way Chinese to English translation work is practically carried out, however, is much more similar to the work of a low-paid, doctrine-based profession like a clergy member, political propagandist, or bureaucratic paper-pusher. In hundreds of instances where I asked an experienced or trained translator why they included a nonsense English phrase in their translation (Chinglish), the answer is consistently that the translation method is authoritative. Some prestigious governmental organizations or academic journals published the nonsense phrase, therefore rendering it authoritative. When taking a CIOL or ATA translation test, where sham English is not permitted, those candidates always fail because just a socially respected person “made something up” is not a good justification for translating a document into invented, unintelligible, or misleading English.

Sham Translations

Why do these expert translators, given an important and high-profile project, keep making things up? Extremely short deadlines combined with extremely low budgets basically force these expert translators to skip the whole process of finding a correct answer, and as a result, reams of publications translated with bizarre, made-up English legal expressions keep getting published. Experts in China are often offered just 15% of the rates paid by international organizations, whether corporations or the United Nations. With budgets this low, experts often default to simply using a machine translator and patching over a few broken spots. These translations are then presented by organizations as authoritative and worthy of emulation and study, becoming a kind of made-up doctrine.

Translator training at the various schools worldwide, with a few exceptions, actually trains translators in this language combination to think more in terms of doctrine and less like an evidence-based profession when dealing with legal and corporate documents. In general, translation programs at universities focus mostly on literature, with translations for business relegated to the margins, if it exists at all. The result is that there is little or no research into how to do these translations, and trainees are explicitly taught to look at sham doctrinal sources in bilingual databases of past translations or in bilingual dictionaries, where past mistakes become standardized in an opaque process. In reality, these dictionaries are usually compiled through haphazard copying and pasting from unverified internet resources.

Much of the motivation for deferring to various doctrinal authorities when translating, and not translating based on the objective facts about how language is used in society, is rooted in traditional culture. Most translators are coming from an English major background and have never been exposed to an evidence-based field, so it is not unusual that they would default to using traditional cultural practices. For example, a translator might say that they translated an expression into a certain nonsense expression because the China Daily or some other prestigious source does so as well. They have no idea whether this is correct or not. When a translator does this – supplanting authority for reason – they are acting much like the imperial examination candidates in ancient China. In ancient times, an imperial examination candidate was expected to thoroughly memorize the ancient Confucian classics word-for-word and be able to complete a test that resonates very strongly with the personal opinion of a highly-placed authority.

In the ancient system, none of this had to do with the truth and was often at direct odds with science, and the imperial system was replaced with a modern one during the 20^th century. Nonetheless, despite obvious progress in society, translators persist in the ancient Confucian system of reasoning from authority, trying to produce a translation that closely follows what earlier translators did and is pleasing to the eye of a venerated high-status authority on translations. As a result, people in the translation community have little or no knowledge of anything apart from the accepted doctrine in their community and various standardized answers for what a “correct” translation should look like. These practices add up to something called “Chinglish” or “Zhonglish” and are poorly understood outside the insular translators’ community. When new doctrines are added, it’s by the same group of people who have very little true knowledge and extensive knowledge of false dogmas.

When these false dogmas are taken into the real world and translations are actually affecting real people’s work, the result is that they wind up destroying value by creating misunderstandings, rather than being a creator of new value.

Genuineness Not Authoritativeness

Authority-based translation is a path to poverty; is there a way for translators and their clients to find meaning in their work? There is indeed a way out and it’s remarkably simple: start by focusing on the purpose of doing translation in itself. In the case of my language combination, Chinese to English, the main reason why someone wants a translation is that they want to, as a speaker of English, accurately understand the content of a document in Chinese, such as a contract or perhaps a compliance report. Showing unquestioning obeisance to some authority figure at a Chinese publication whom the reader has never heard of serves the exact opposite of the purpose why the translation was requested if it greatly frustrates the reader’s ability to understand the document.

Instead of focusing on a distant authority’s personal opinion, focus on your reader’s personal opinion. For example, let’s assume your reader is a judge in New York looking at an agreement’s arbitration clause.  For your task, an authority in China may believe this is concept in English called “diversified dispute resolution,” but this is a term that is only used in China, therefore a judge in New York only knows of this practice by the name of “alternative dispute resolution.” Translations from China using diversified dispute resolution only do so because underpaid and rushed translators doing the first “authoritative” translation couldn’t figure out how to translate back into English and simply punted on the issue. Since your reader or client probably doesn’t have time for an in-depth interview, the most efficient route for you to focus on what your reader can adequately understand is to look at genuine documents produced from within their discourse community.

Discourse Studies is a vast and well-respected science, and I recommend reading the whole Cambridge Handbook on it; for this article, I’ll simply give a brief explanation of how to apply it to a legal translation. If you are writing a translation to be put before a New York judge like in the above example – which I have done many times and involving this exact scenario – then you need to look at what other New York judges are reading and writing about arbitration specifically and alternative dispute resolution to be able to understand how to accomplish the translation. You need to have good evidence sufficient to predict how a New York judge would write about this issue, or what kind of actual arbitration clauses New York judges are actually seeing presented to their court and are ruling on. You could also look at federal cases such as Allied-Bruce Terminix. The importance is the genuineness of the document as related to this discourse community.

The genuineness of the writing determines whether you can use it as evidence that your reader will be able to accurately understand what you have to say. In China, whenever I have local translators do this, the first thing they do is jump onto Google and pull up websites from China, Japan, and Bangladesh as evidence about what people in New York are saying and doing. At least 90% of translators or students who majored in English will go straight for a document from some distant foreign country, simply because it matches how English as a second language speakers would write. It shows they have little exposure to the world of English-speaking countries and little notion of how to write or say something about the law that can be readily understood, and not misinterpreted. For a translator to overcome such limitations, they need to engage in very expansive reading about the legal, political, and cultural systems used in English-speaking countries to gain significant exposure and understanding of language as used by the writers and readers of their translated documents.