There is a stark difference between how translators are trained in China compared to in English-speaking countries. Through my own extensive experience with translating in China, in addition to what I’ve read and observed, I’ve realized that Chinese translators often approach translation from an “intuitive” approach, rather than from an “expertise” oriented perspective.
In English, to translate a text is to convey the meaning of the text in the target language as if it was originally written in that target language. However, Chinese translators often ignore that last important bit of criteria.
When faced with expressions or terminology they don’t understand, they would often default to a pseudoscientific approach of translating things word for word: the translator would break up the unknown term into individual words, look up the meaning of these words in a dictionary, and simply put these dictionary-translated words back in order.
Issues plaguing accepted Chinese-to-English translation methodology
This often results in literally-translated nonsense or “Chinglish” – incomprehensible at best and misleading at worst to a native English reader. I call this the “code conversion” method of translating because it is a step up from code switching, i.e. mixing two languages together. Translators take code switching a step further when individual words and terms are “converted” accordingly and then put back together into a grammatically correct order in a way that does not convey the intended meaning. For example, Western academics have often observed that the official Chinese translations issued by the Chinese government, while grammatically correct, often do not use the same words and expressions that a native English speaker would use, and instead make up different “English” words of their own born from this code conversion method. As a result, these translations often cannot even be considered legitimate English, and would certainly not be accurately understood by the translation’s intended audience, thus disqualifying it as a translation from a Western perspective.
Propagation of “Code Converted” Translations
These initial mistranslations then quickly spread due to another inherent issue with Chinese translations, which is a reliance on tradition and authority. Picture this scenario: a senior translator looked up to as an expert and translation authority by the various translation schools and maybe even the media comes across an unknown term when translating from Chinese to English – their second language. They turn to the code conversion method, using only intuition to break down the word and put it back together as a translation. The resulting translation is something that no native English speaker would have come up with, but becomes enshrined as an authoritative reference for all future translations. In all later translations, other translators would reason that this particular mistranslation was the right translation for a particular term just because it was the opinion of this respected authority.
In the pre-internet age, these mistranslations were common due to the difficulty of properly researching the correct English terms to use for specific expressions. The real issue is how difficult these mistranslations are to correct, even when the correct translations for these terms can be readily researched today. This is again because of the reliance on lazy code conversion translating. After all, why put extra effort into researching terminology and properly understanding source text to come up with an original translation, when a translator can simply refer to older, established word-to-word translations of individual terms and plug them into their translation? There also exists an environment of not wanting to question senior translators, who have been working with these mistranslations their entire career and want nothing more than to have them be taken as the true translations. The big problem, of course, is that sticking to these methods produces highly unnatural and unintelligible translations which can only be understood by the Chinese translation community itself, and are misleading or incomprehensible to their intended audience.
In fact, in the 1990s and early 2000s, there were major efforts by the English-speaking expatriate community in China to correct these mistakes, which ultimately failed due to the reasons above. Senior translators stubbornly insisted on using these incorrect translations and translation methods because of their vested interest in placing their own intuition-based methods on a pedestal and remaining respected. This is ultimately why these mistranslations have stuck around, despite Chinese translators today having the potential resources and ability to produce Chinese to English translations of much better quality.
Declining Translation Value
Of course, I have singled out Chinese to English translations above due to that being my area of expertise, but I am confident that such problems also exist in translations between Chinese and other languages. And it is my belief that this problem is driving down Chinese market prices for translations in general. If a translation is undertaken using such a system, there would be virtually no difference in work quality between the best translation experts in China and an inexperienced student. In terms of practical value to the client, there would likely be little difference between the two translations. So, why should clients pay more for an expert translation, when a cheap translation by a random student would provide the same value? This would also explain the global dominance of American and British cultural products relative to Chinese home-grown products. Products originally in the English language benefit from being effectively translated into other languages, while Chinese products are disadvantaged on the global market due to poor intuition-based translations.
By sticking to ineffective intuition-based translations, Chinese translators are diminishing their own value and that of the translation market in China.
A Move Toward Expertise-Driven Translation
If intuition-driven translation is ineffective, how should translation be approached? In my opinion, the answer lies in basing translations upon expertise. In any other widely-respected profession, practices are based on proven systems and expert knowledge, and translation should be no different.
An expertise-driven translation can only be delivered by a translator who is themselves an expert on whatever text they are translating. After all, how can you effectively translate a text when you don’t understand what it’s saying? This is why the most celebrated technical translators have often been engineers, and the most capable legal translators lawyers, not foreign language students. The translator of the Three Body Problem, one of China’s most well-known science fiction novels, is himself an award-winning novelist. A leading translator would be someone who not only is a language expert, but one who possesses a professional background relevant to what they are translating.
Professional expertise is so important primarily because of linguistics: different communities communicate within themselves differently and possess different cultures. This means that insider knowledge of these communities is necessary to provide the context for fully understanding the text or documents produced by this community. The same word can have multiple different meanings depending on this context, which is precisely why the code conversion method of translating text word-for-word is so flawed – language is part of human society, and cannot be boiled down to a simple vocabulary list.
An effective translation thus requires the translator to understand the source document from the perspective of a member of this community. For example, to translate a court document, the translator needs to understand what is really being said. They need to understand not just the legal terminology used, but also how the court system works, how the participants in this system would communicate with each other, what they are thinking about, and what motivates them.
Obtaining Expertise as a Translator
Fortunately, expertise can be learned like any other skill or knowledge, and we need not look for translators only among lawyers and engineers desiring a career change (these professionals would not make good translators without training either, as I describe in this article here). A good translator does not even have to be a true expert in a single specialized area – due to how unspecialized the field of translation is, translators would often be called on to translate documents across different but related fields, meaning that a general practitioner’s knowledge of several different fields would serve them better. The translator need not necessarily require formal training as an lawyer or engineer, they simply need to fully acquire deep knowledge of how matters in these fields are discussed.
When working with specific, non-routine subject matter, I would recommend translators follow either a forward-looking or backward-looking approach to acquiring expertise. For the former, the translator should estimate how much time would be needed to complete an assigned translation project, and devote 10% of that time before starting the project on studying information related to the subject being translated. If deadlines are too tight for this approach, the backward-looking approach can be adopted; where the translator estimates the total amount of time spent translating text in one field and sets aside 10-15% of this time spent to research this field. Overall, this would result in the translator spending approximately 20% of their working hours on off-the-clock training.
This 20% target is what is generally accepted by corporate HR departments as being attainable for the average worker. Nevertheless, it is a significant portion of time, and a big ask for any professional working full-time. In my opinion, however, deliberate learning of expert specialized knowledge is required for a translator to improve their skills over time. Many new translators quickly improve initially just by working on translation projects and gaining experience, but begin stagnating in skill after only a few years. Personally, I have observed many Chinese to English translators actually declining in performance throughout their careers, due to them only learning more about the language used by their fellow translators, instead of objective expert knowledge.
Conclusion
The word-for-word literal translations plaguing Chinese to English translations today have come about due to intuitive methods of translating Chinese without fully understanding the source text. These translations might be perfectly grammatically correct, but would be incomprehensible and misleading to their intended English-speaking audience. Translators are required to be both language experts and have detailed knowledge of the subject matter being translated to produce valuable, expertise-driven translations.
