The Native Language Principle is a longstanding rule followed in Western Europe and the Americas. It dictates that a translator should only translate from their weaker language into their stronger native language, the idea being that doing so ensures better translation results. In theory, a native speaker should have a better grasp of the appropriate word choices, sentence structure, and tone to adopt in a translation compared to a translator writing in their non-native language. These are all important to ensure that the final translation reads more naturally to its audience, presumed to be native speakers of the target language.
In fact, this principle has been explicitly stated as fact by many authoritative voices in the translation industry. In a set of recommendations published by the UN in 1976 on protecting and improving the status of translators, the organization provides that “a translator should, as far as possible, translate into his own mother tongue or into a language of which he or she has a mastery equal to that of his or her mother tongue.” The American Translator’s Association, the largest US professional association for translators and interpreters, also state in their translation buyer’s guide that clients should make sure that a hired translator is translating into their native language. If a professional translator does not respect even this basic rule, the guide warns, who knows what other “important quality issues” they might also be ignoring? However, it is also true that numerous countries outside the West do not follow the native speaker rule. In particular, this rule is not widely adopted in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Slavic language regions.
It is certainly true that native English-speaking translators produce more readable and fluent translations when translating from Chinese to English. An English-speaking audience can more easily understand their translations, they would rarely introduce “Chinglish” mistranslations, and the translators also tend to work faster when translating into their native language. However, modern organization science, particularly organizational psychology, recommends the use of diverse teams and not limiting team members to a single ethnic or cultural background. For example, when defeating Chinglish, native English translators are more likely to produce “inaccuracies,” which a native Chinese translator can easily spot and correct. This is not only due to the native English translator’s weaker grasp of the Chinese language, but cultural knowledge is also key.
The Native Language Principle: Fluency vs. Accuracy
Conventionally, the translation industry today sees this as a tradeoff between fluency and accuracy. Translators translating into their source language would produce more fluent but less accurate translations, while those doing the reverse would produce more accurate translations at the cost of readability. In cases where pinpoint accuracy is most important, and the source text is hard to understand, some have even argued that a non-native translator should be hired over a native speaker. In a 2013 article published in The Linguist, Karen Rückert argues that the ideal legal translator for translating a law from one language and legal system on a complex topic into another “might actually be a native-speaking (legal) expert of the source language” capable of fully explaining “the peculiarities of the legal issue concerned.” Engaging a native speaker of the target language is more likely to lead to a perfectly fluent yet inaccurate and misleading translation if the translator cannot fully understand the laws being translated.
Rückert challenges the traditional native speaker norm based on the lack of empirical evidence verifying its efficacy. In the same article mentioned above, Rückert asked seven native English translators and six native German translators to translate a short legal text from German into English. And at the 2013 Dutch National Translation Conference, two native Dutch translators and two native English translators were tasked to translate a 300-word museum guide from Dutch into English.
The results? In the two tests, the native English and native Dutch/German translators both put out work of similar assessed quality. Rückert even goes so far as to claim that both the native English and German translators in her experiment largely made the same types of errors. While the small sample sizes and less-than-rigorous methodology employed in these studies mean that we can’t conclusively state if the native speaker principle has been disproven, these experiments certainly didn’t find any evidence to support it either. At least among the professional and highly qualified translators asked to participate, one’s native language did not appear to have an influence on translation quality. However, more research should be done in Europe to see if diverse translation teams outperform homogenous translation teams. Currently, the best evidence available is direct industry observations by experts—evidence that professional scientists consider to be the weakest albeit a suitable basis for a hypothesis.
In short, Rückert does not disregard the native speaker principle but does espouse that, sometimes, a kind of “reverse” native speaker principle be used. Originally, the reverse native speaker principle was adopted in the diplomatic sphere after observations that interpreters could not fully understand the message they were asked to convey. In business translation, the theory is frequently used today, but as a cost-cutting approach; non-native linguists tend to be more plentiful and, therefore, less expensive. Professor Victor Mair pointed out that when the what I call the “reverse native” approach was applied in China on international law matters he reviewed, it resulted in the creation of a grammatically correct version of English where the words mean something totally different than intended.
What exactly is a Native Speaker?
Even putting these issues aside, the term “native speaker” is also problematic. Many different competing definitions have been proposed in the field of linguistics for what the term should actually mean, and it is even possible for a native speaker to lose proficiency and no longer be native-like in their original native tongue after living in another language environment. The term “native speaker” also carries with it negative racial and colonial connotations, as it had originally been used by European colonists in the 19th century to differentiate between white and non-white speakers of the same European languages. Thus, I have no doubt that native speaker qualification concepts originated from white supremacy, and indeed today, language-based discrimination is a major priority for the EEOC.
These issues have actually resulted in many government organizations today prohibiting discrimination based on “native speaker” characterizations. In the US, while employers can be allowed to make employment decisions based on language fluency, they are not allowed to specifically hire only native language speakers, which can be interpreted as the legally prohibited act of “discrimination based on national origin.” The same applies in Europe, and employers generally adopt the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), a system for classifying language proficiency created by the EU. This framework defines six different language mastery levels, from A1 to C2, moving away from using the terms “native speaker” or “mother tongue” to describe language proficiency. A C2 language speaker, the highest level of language fluency under the system, is not called a native speaker but simply described as some who is able to understand, summarize, and present information “spontaneously, very fluently and precisely” in that language. Similarly, the American ILR system describes the top-level ILR-5 as the proficiency of a highly articulate speaker, avoiding the term “native speaker.”
Some organizations, however, still do put a heavy emphasis on being a native speaker. For instance, the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) uses an A-B-C language proficiency system where the “A” language is defined as the interpreter’s mother tongue. Its guidelines go on to state that interpreters should primarily only interpret into their mother “A” language from the other languages that they work with. While their justification is that doing so would allow interpreters to express complicated ideas more fluently, I believe that this focus on only interpreting into one’s mother tongue leads to a lower diversity of opinion: interpreters will tend to only express ideas from one cultural perspective, sometimes failing to accurately interpret foreign cultural nuances into their mother tongue. This can be good or bad, depending on the context. Additionally, under the AIIC system, it is possible for some interpreters to have no “A” language at all – I have heard of some interpreters raised in two different countries being described as having two “B” languages instead. Compared to the CEFR, where even non-native speakers can attain C2 fluency in a language, the AIIC’s subjective rating methods open the door to discrimination based on an interpreter’s national origin.
Practical Issues with Conventional Chinese to English Translation
For a variety of practical reasons, translators in other language pairs generally translate from their native language into English, their second language. The native speaker principle is instead more commonly seen applied by language service providers (LSPs) translating between English and a European language. In the Chinese to English language pair, for instance, native Chinese translators tend to translate both ways between Chinese and English. There are two main reasons for this: First, there is simply too much demand for translations into English and not enough native English speakers working in these language pairs to meet this demand. Second, significantly higher white-collar wages in Western countries mean that hiring native English-speaking translators is often much more expensive than hiring a native Chinese translator based in Asia.
What I’ve observed is that translation companies who do hire native English speakers for Chinese to English translation tend to save costs by cutting the budget for editing or proofreading the translation, sometimes skipping these steps entirely. In more extreme cases, this might even happen for translations produced by non-native English speakers. This cost-cutting obviously results in extremely poor-quality work – a good example is the relative global dominance of US/UK products and cultural goods. These goods and products benefit from higher-quality and more appealing translations, whereas similar products from other countries often perform poorly in English-speaking markets due to being badly translated.
The Re-discovered Collaborative Teamwork Approach
As I’ve briefly covered in a previous article, the mainstream translation approach today is the TEP process, which lays out three steps, Translation, Editing, and Proofreading. To save costs, however, LSPs generally hire isolated freelancers to complete the translation, each responsible for only one part of the translation process. In this production line approach, only the project manager in charge communicates with the translator, editor, and proofreader, who remain anonymous to each other. This results in little teamwork between each role – translators are unable to discuss issues brought up by the editor, and the editor is unable to ask the translator clarifying questions. Even worse, this model encourages each of them to find as much fault as possible with the work produced by the other parties in order to protect their own reputations.
I go into much more detail laying out the flaws in this process in my article on TEP here, and I believe there is a better way to go about translation, which is the teamwork approach adopted at CBL. This approach also presents an alternative take on the native speaker principle: instead of having isolated translators, proofreaders, and editors working inside information silos through a project manager, we pair native Chinese translators with native English editors in a team, where each party can collectively discuss changes and translation decisions. This approach allows us to produce translations that are both fluent and accurate in the same amount of time. However, even newbie translation students in China can outperform Shanghai’s best translators on quality when translating into English when collaborating closely with native English speakers. The TEP methodology prohibits close collaboration and therefore achieves inferior results.
While rarely seen in the Chinese to English translation industry today, this teamwork approach actually has a basis in the translation methods adopted by Jesuit missionaries to China in the 17th century, which a book by Princeton Professor Benjamin Elman explores in detail (available free on Princeton.edu). Elman summarizes his findings on historical records about the “lost” art of diversity in translation in China, even when translating into Chinese:
“The Kangxi emperor (r. 1662–1722) reproduced the institutional models for translation that Xu Guangqi (1562–1633) had created with the help of Matteo Ricci and Li Zhizao (1565–1630). Later, on an even larger scale, the Protestant missionaries collaborated with Chinese to translate post–Industrial Revolution science and technology into Chinese after 1850.” (Elman at p. xxiv) I genuinely believe that the Kangxi emperor developed a superior model to translation than which later emerged in Europe—because later European practices were tainted by the biases of slavery, master race ideologies, and white supremacy, and the emperor Kangxi, by virtue of being a mixed-race person ruling over an ostensibly foreign culture, had the clarity needed to promote a system that could draw on the diverse knowledge of European and Chinese translators. Thus, the notion of “Chinglish” was alien to contemporary observers of 300 years of Qing rule, rather, it emerged in 1936 when a Japanese invasion derailed Kangxi’s translation model, and the fascist government of Japan began introducing China to organizational culture based on the master race ideology.
Why did Kangxi’s system develop in this way to begin with? The Jesuits’ translations of scientific and cultural texts needed to be fully understandable and familiar to the Chinese reader with little knowledge of Western customs or culture, which required input from a native Chinese speaker. This led to the Jesuits often working together with native Chinese scholars on translation, producing highly articulate and accurate translations of a quality rarely seen today with the TEP approach. One such notable work is the translation of the Diagrams and Explanations of the Wonderful Machines of the Far West by Jesuit Johann Schreck and Chinese scholar Wang Zheng, intended to present Western mechanical inventions to a Chinese audience.
Jesuits, such as Prospero Intorcetta, also translated many Chinese cultural works into English and other European languages during this time. They were likely the first to translate Chinese plays into European languages, and they also produced the famed Sinarum philosophus, sive Scientia sinensis latine exposita, a Latin translation of the Confucian classics intended for a wide European audience, including “clerics and laymen, Catholics and heretics.” Today, the Jesuits are widely credited as having introduced the Western world to the philosophy of Confucius, shaping how the Europeans regarded China.
The quick spread of Confucian texts throughout Europe is thus a testament to the quality of the Jesuit translations of ancient Confucian and Chinese texts, quality which the conveyor belt TEP process today often fails to replicate. In their collaborative approach to translation, an editor who is a native speaker of the target language not only edits an initial translation for fluency but also provides insight into how the translation’s audience would perceive the translation, which the non-native translator cannot always grasp on their own. This exchange of knowledge between translators and editors of diverse backgrounds, in my opinion, is the best way to produce translations that can fluently convey the accurate meaning of the source text. Rather than the conventional production-line approach of having the translator be responsible for a translation’s “accuracy” and the editor only tasked to make the final work “fluent” afterward, both editors and translators should be actively communicating with each other to shape the translation.
Conclusion
Translators usually have one weaker and one more proficient language. While the native speaker principle dictates that translators should only translate into their native language, practical considerations, such as cost, often mean that this is not the case, especially for the Chinese to English language pair. Nevertheless, it is not clear if the native speaker principle genuinely holds up in practice – the theory has never been empirically tested. Scientific findings from the organizational psychology field, however, indicate that promoting diversity gets superior results compared to making decisions based on ethnic categories. The best translations are produced by both native Chinese and English translators working together as a team, where these different native language speakers can share the full depth of their knowledge about what the meaning of expressions in each language actually entails, ensuring that no knowledge is excluded from the translation decisions. At CBL, we believe in having this diversity and ensure all translations are produced by a team of experts who actually communicate with each other to improve the final work.
