The Chinese to English language pair is one of the hardest to translate between. This is in part due to the almost complete lack of shared culture between China and the majority of the English-speaking world. The two languages are also from two completely different language families: Chinese is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, which includes the Chinese, Burmese, and Tibetan languages, while English is part of the Indo-European family, composed of most European languages and Indo-Iranian languages.
Translating between two languages from the same family is typically simple, as not only would the culture behind these two languages be more similar, but all languages in the same family are actually derived from one common ancestral language. This makes it highly likely for individual words and expressions in one language to have equivalents in other languages in the same family. Many words in these languages are basically the same, simply painted in a different color. The problem with Chinese to English translation today is that many translators in the language pair rely on bilingual dictionaries and glossaries in their translation work, despite the distinct genealogies of both languages meaning that there is often no good word-for-word equivalent for a Chinese term or expression in English.
Issues with Translating across Language Families
In short, a translator translating a document within a single language family benefits from both the shared culture of the original document author and the audience for their translation and from the many equivalent words found in both languages. A Chinese to English translator cannot rely on any of that and is required to have a grasp of both Chinese and western culture, as well as an understanding of how to present Chinese expressions in a way that might be expressed by a native English speaker. This would require, for instance, a Chinese legal translator translating a contract to look up similar contracts written natively in English to ensure that they use the same language that a US/UK lawyer would use.
Translating between two different cultures without the required cultural understanding creates nonsensical and incomprehensible results. It is a problem prevalent in the current Chinese to English translation market and has contributed to the low rates paid for translation work in this language pair. But this issue is by no means unique to these two languages – translating between different language families and cultures has often led to poor results due to the lack of equivalence between the two languages. For example, in this 1945 paper, linguist Eugene Nida lays out the difficulties of translating Jewish terms and traditions into languages used by cultures with no previous exposure to these concepts.
The “Flipping A Coin” Approach and Why it Fails
This, however, doesn’t mean that cultural differences between English and Chinese make translation between the two languages impossible. Very good Chinese to English translations can and do exist in every field. The real issue is that, despite the lack of equivalence between English and Chinese, many Chinese translators working in this language pair still persist in using word-for-word translation methods, which simply do not work for two languages this culturally distinct. This approach differs from the Western understanding of translation, which is that a translation should present the meaning of the text in some target language as if the text was originally written in that language. In Chinese, the term “translation” is known as “fanyi”, which literally means “flipping over”. Individual words and expressions are “flipped over” according to some authoritative bilingual glossary, with no thought paid to whether or not the produced translation would be comprehensible to a native speaker of the target language.
This translation style actually has a long history in China, dating all the way back to the 2nd century AD when Chinese and Indian Buddhist monks collaborated to translate Buddhist scriptures from India into Chinese. The severe shortage of monks proficient in both languages (the original scriptures were largely in Sanskrit or Pali) meant that much of this translation work relied on glossaries created by the few monks capable of understanding both languages, such as the Chinese monk Dao An. Over time, these glossaries became extremely extensive and served as a crucial basis for many translations up until the 19th century, when regular travel between China and India began.
Born out of necessity due to a lack of skilled translators and language resources, these flawed translations of Buddhist scripture often made little sense to native Chinese speakers. You would have to study this translated Chinese as its own foreign language, separate from regular Chinese, in order to understand the text. Unfortunately, this statement is still true for many Chinese translations into English today because this “flipping over a coin” approach has persisted. Many Chinese translators remain reliant on these methods today and produce predictably bad translations: In the legal translation field, there used to be a common sentiment amongst international clients that Chinese legal translation was simply not worth paying for, as most of the work produced was incomprehensible.
Translation is Not Transcoding
So, how should a proper translation from one language family into another be produced? The first step for a translator is to understand that researching terminology does not end with looking up the word in a bilingual glossary. There are few exactly equivalent English and Chinese words with the same meaning in all contexts, so the translator needs to actually understand the meaning of a word in the context of the discourse community that produced the document.
This involves reading materials natively written in English by these communities and finding good evidence from these native sources to support your translation. While time-consuming, it is only by basing translations on these native sources that a translator can understand how to present text in a way that would be meaningful and useful. I’ve often recommended that a translator look up and read parallel documents written natively in English before starting on a project. If there is no time to do so, a translator can also use downtime between or after projects to independently read native English documents on topics they are usually tasked to translate.
For example, in my article on Databases for Legal Translation, I provide several case studies and tips about how databases with corpora of real-world texts can be leveraged to achieve correct translations. The general point is that dictionaries that tell you how to “flip” a word are outdated and unscientific. When translating Chinese texts for legal content, for example, look at the SEC database, which has both kinds of texts in it. I also walk you through the process in my article about why the word “enterprise” is almost always a mistranslation when it appears in texts translated from Chinese. For people who see translation as a matter of looking things up in the dictionary and matching a word found there, the thought process that considers what the word qiye in Chinese really means can seem unfamiliar. However, considering the reality behind the language is the only way to effectively translate across language families.
The Takeaway
Cultural differences and lack of common ancestral words between English and Chinese make translation between these two very different language families difficult. Translators need to understand the culture of the communities they are translating for in order to produce accurate translations that read as if they were written natively in the target language. However, Chinese translation is still rooted in ancient techniques and traditions overly reliant on translating text word for word using bilingual glossaries that do not take context into account, resulting in incomprehensible and useless translations.
