Groupthink, the tendency for people to follow others’ lead like sheep, explains why Chinese companies’ international launches are failing, and they are more likely to be sanctioned or criminally charged than to succeed. The root cause for these failures boils down to bad translation and linguistic practices, but how did things get so bad for them? My answer is that companies in China have a very strong, organizationally driven groupthink culture dominating their internationalization efforts.
Most native English translators in China are already aware that most firms and companies operating in the country have historically resisted, even attacked, good English. What happens in practice is that these companies decide they want to expand internationally or improve their service to foreign customers using English, so hire a translator from the United States or United Kingdom. The companies then receive work different to the Chinglish they know and love, and promptly become hysterical that they didn’t get what they expected. Newer, naive native English translators entering the field think that local company staff will respect their opinion on English — yet this totally false. The foreigner’s opinion will be totally rejected because of the groupthink behavior influencing the majority of the company.
Not only will the foreigner’s opinion be rejected, but the company will also then go out and find a freelance translator not native in English who will plug the document into Google Translate, which generates Chinglish and also has it follow basic English grammatical rules. The client is then totally delighted and goes to the native English translator and says to them, this is what an excellent translation looks like, and simply asks the English native to lightly, and carefully “polish” the document to “enhance” it without breaking it. Native English translators, now the lapdog of a robot in sheep’s clothing, shortly thereafter quit the Chinese business translation industry, which is why there are only about a half dozen translators working with Chinese corporations even though there are hundreds translating novels and thousands working for Western governments.
Such was the story of the well-publicized failed international product launches by cutting-edge corporations Tencent and Alibaba around 2016, and this doomed-to-fail behavior nonetheless is typical of most international Chinese product launches today. To understand this failure, we’ll need to dig a bit deeper into the phenomenon known as groupthink.
The groupthink phenomenon
Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when a group of people make decisions without critical thinking or analysis. It is a form of group cohesion wherein members of a group come together and make decisions based on the collective opinion of the group, rather than individual members. Groupthink is a major scientific research topic, originally pioneered by psychologist Irving Janis in 1972, whose research into the behavior of groups concluded that groupthink was responsible for the failure of many group decisions.
The group members may feel an intense pressure to conform to the group’s opinion, even if it is not the best decision. For example, a native English translator was once told by a Chinese corporation’s manager that, if he disagreed with a Chinglish expression, it was because “You don’t understand China and you don’t understand [Brand Name].” In this case, intense pressure meant being fired.
A key problem with groupthink among translators that it can lead to a lack of critical thinking that leads to incoherent translations. When members of the group are focused on conforming to the group’s opinion, they may be less likely to consider alternatives or challenge the group’s opinion. When members of the group feel an intense pressure to conform to the group’s opinion, they may be less likely to consider alternatives or challenge the group’s opinion. In my early experiences with translation on-site, I saw so-called senior translators attempting to force other translators to uncritically accept their opinions. Privately, native English translators would complain about the absurd things the majority had demanded they put into the translations.
Several basic social behaviors drive these bad decisions. Team members feel a sense of unity and solidarity, and they may be reluctant to voice dissenting opinions. This can lead to a narrowing of perspectives, which creates a sense of pressure. Members of the group may feel that they must conform to the group’s opinion, even if it is not the best decision.
When group members feel an intense pressure to conform to the group’s opinion, they may be less likely to consider alternatives or challenge the group’s opinion. This can lead to poor decision-making as the group is focused on conforming rather than analyzing the situation.
Textbook cases of groupthink
Groupthink can be seen in many real-life situations outside the translation industry. One example is the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, in which the United States attempted to invade Cuba. The invasion was planned and executed by a group of individuals with similar backgrounds and experiences, and they were unable to consider alternatives or challenge the group’s opinion. A number of serious blunders were made that led directly to the invasion’s failure and a significant loss of life. Operational security was so pitiful that even the New York Times literally published advanced warning of the invasion.
Another example is the 1986 Challenger disaster, covered in the excellent Netflix documentary Challenger: The Final Flight, in which the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff. The decision to launch the shuttle was also made by a group of individuals with similar backgrounds and experiences, and they were unable to consider alternatives or challenge the group’s opinion. Whenever an engineer raised concerns about the possibility that the space shuttle could explode on the way up, the managing engineers leading the project assured them that failure in this situation is basically impossible. This led to the destruction of the Challenger and the loss of seven astronauts.
In Chinese-English translation, a famous disaster where groupthink caused terrible decisions is the Air China magazine racism controversy. A 2016 edition of Air China Magazine outraged the United Kingdom when it cautioned passangers that “precautions are needed when entering areas mainly populated by Indians, Pakistanis and black people.” Apparently, translation staff working in-house responsible for localizing the content for reading by English travelers, all agreed that such comments are not only appropriate but also absolutely true, and therefore decided to publish it. Should their staff had considered the ideas and opinions of British persons, they would have at least been warned off from the mistake. Moreover, their travel guide to the United Kingdom would also have been of better quality overall if it included some input by people familiar with the United Kingdom.
What groupthink means for Chinese-English translation
The only way a company like ByteDance or Huawei would choose to blame Google Translate and not an evil foreign conspiracy, is if you show them damning proof that their translation was produced using Google Translate. Otherwise, they will look at the translation and say their communications are spot on, foreign opinion be damned. Groupthink in most organizations is a serious problem, however companies in China take it to a new extreme where they reject even legitimate expertise in a field, hence the phenomena “Chinese brands stop at China’s borders.”
The intense groupthink behavior of companies in China has much to do with the local corporate culture emphasizing harmony and cohesion; in books on Chinese corporate culture I read, disagreement is characterized as a “waste of time.” Further intensifying the problem is the fact that native English speakers, especially translators, are generally going to be highly isolated and marginalized due to their extremely low headcount, and Chinese companies see even the lowest United States salaries as an exorbitant expense. Since they value harmony, introducing a different opinion to deliberately disrupt that harmony is simply not on the menu. An additional layer of marginalization for the native English speaker is added by the immense number of fake news media groups that constantly rehash the message “the West is wrong” in various ways, which you can also find on English-speaking platforms like Quora.
Thus, the Chinese company’s team will default to the opinion of its own members, who are at the center of the power structure and also the most numerous. These are also team members who have probably never had a conversation with anyone not Chinese, never studied or lived abroad, and whose foreign area knowledge comes totally from books written in Chinese by other Chinese people; who, for their part, also don’t have any international experience. The same is likely true of a number of similarly situated countries but, in China’s case, the output that results is not just awkward English, it is basically word salad since Mandarin Chinese is so difficult to translate or localize.
The organizational structure of these Chinese companies strongly affects the whole spectrum of translation, localization, and corporate communication and dooms these companies to repeated failures. Any native English linguists working with these companies are basically doomed to view the same comedy of errors repeated over and over again: the companies will reject good English in favor of Chinglish, forcing a result that conforms to the Chinese majority, and their big international expansion will flop. The company will research the issue or be criticized by foreign media for its poor internationalization, and a year or two later learn a little bit from these failures and slightly tone down its demands for Chinglish.
The bottom line is that these companies will refuse to accept even basic correct English unless they experience serious pain. Moreover, what changes do occur are inevitably the very minimum needed to avoid repeating past mistakes.
Even successful localizers, such as ByteDance, still face issues. While the company had its advertising copy in good shape, it failed to respect United States cultural and behavioral norms and landed in hot water in a data privacy controversy, a problem that could be solved with adequate legal compliance documents within the company. For companies with an authority-based culture, like Huawei, there are criminal charges for business executives based on irresponsible translation practices.
