d Unbeknownst to most translators working between Chinese and English, the amount of time it takes, even with extreme amounts of dedication, is extremely long to reach native-like proficiency levels. Using optimal conditions and practices, researchers have found that the time to attain native-like skill can be over a decade, even between European languages. A translator devoting themselves to language study starting at age 18 might reach native-like proficiency in English by about age 30. Based on directory listings and some small surveys, I would say that out of about the 20,000 Chinese translators out there, no more than 100 have reached this level.
The only Chinese translators I’ve ever met who have native-like second language ability are all certified by leading international bodies such as the ATA. I can find about fifty people out there with this level of certification (.25%), so conservatively estimate that no more than 1% of professional translators will ever have even foundational language skills — not to mention the host of other professional skills needed to be an effective translator. I believe the skills deficit is due primarily to bad learning practices and the formation of bad habits picked up in universities.
Miseducation at Universities
While translator training at Chinese universities conforms to international practices, including the abandonment of memorization-based learning, the international university system itself is very inadequate for training translators. Since I teach classes at a leading university, this isn’t an indictment of academics because society as a whole drives bad practices for universities. The university system for Chinese translators now consists of a four-year, graded English study program followed by a 2.5-year Masters of Translation & Interpreting degree. Both programs are stuck in a Catch-22: by virtue of being situated in universities, they basically indoctrinate students to the opposite mindset they need to succeed.
As broad social evidence of this issue, consider that the Shanghai International Studies University’s ultra-famous conference interpreter training program was designed as a non-degree program. There is a degree program for interpreters, but the respected program is a non-degree program. The minute students get degrees, the value of the education falls greatly. Let’s dig into the details while thinking about ways a Chinese translator can overcome these obstacles.
The core problem of a degree program is that language and translation skill revolve around proficiency levels, whereas university programs revolve around grades. When I was a young liberal arts major preparing to go to law school, this made sense for a very traditional university offering unconnected classes taught by a diversity of experts who are encouraged to disagree with and debate each other’s opinions. However, if you visit GOVTILR.ORG, you can see plainly that experts agree the various language services skills are on a single, linear proficiency scale. By training translators on a system designed around academic debate, students are indoctrinated to focus on grades of individual courses and not their overall global proficiency level. Translation trainees I have encountered in their fifth or sixth year of higher education are extremely highly motivated by grades, yet I’ve never heard a future translator spontaneously say they need to improve professional skills like that seen on GOVTILR.ORG.
Outside of translation services, research finding that learners do not gain any skill improvement while at university is very common. Translation services are slightly better; presentations given at the government ILR indicate that language majors may graduate with a score of 2+, when a translator should ideally be scoring 4 or above. In China, the English score on graduation seems to be about an ILR level 2. This basically implies that graduates are coming out with maybe one-fifth of the knowledge they need to actually process a typical document translation.
Consequences of Unskilled Translators
For institutions — corporations, law firms, and government — it basically means that the university system is producing proficiency levels so low that it’s impossible to rely on the work of a typical translator. Since the value of the work is so low, institutions slash their pay. For example, New York pays its court interpreters worse than its court reporters. They have turned translation services into a kind of Potemkin Village which society thinks may be reliable but is actually fracturing international cooperation.
This is not to say that translation is not valued, only that translators are not producing much value. Consider an example of a New York translation firm founded by a friend who worked on numerous multi-billion dollar cases for law firms. For a 100,000 word case file, they might charge $30,000, with $7,000, or 5%, going to translators. Since translators’ language skill was too poor to communicate with clients, they hired professional English-speaking staff to communicate with clients, taking up 35% of all costs, or $10,500. They would literally have to do a Q&A with the translator, get answers, and take that broken English and translate it into proper English for each client communication. The English coming back hardly made any sense, so they spent another $5,000 on rewriting the file. The remainder went to advertising and shareholder profits. Thus, about 70% of the costs were spent on special translation services to overcome the fact that the translators’ skills were woefully inadequate to translate eDiscovery files. These were not bad translators: these were all best-in-the-business freelancers who had American university degrees and charged five times what people back in China were getting. Moreover, all that rigmarole was to make the Chinese translation service superficially appear to be adequate. Nobody could tell if the English rewriters were accurate; the translators would argue with proper English, making any translators’ review of the changes impossible.
These translators had a Level 3 proficiency on the ILR scale, above the Level 2 usually seen in China but below the Level 4 of genuinely competent translators. So, what can translators do?
Continuous Learning
If you’re someone interested in a translation services career, you can avoid all of these traps by adopting a dramatic change in your mindset to continuous learning. This is especially true for Chinese translators; if you are starting at age 18 and are very dedicated, then you might attain the right skills by age 26. Numerous books by language acquisition scientists have described the best ways to attain the foundational language skills needed to provide good translation service, and I can provide some suggestions here. You need to be measuring your progress on a general proficiency scale where an increase might take two or three years for each step. Grades in themselves are totally irrelevant to proficiency and, later, employability. In addition to having a long-term mindset, you need the right, science-based approach.
For Chinese translators, ancient pre-scientific tradition urges lots of memorization and practice, with memorization traditionally emphasized by the Scholar-Official class and practice urged by the warrior class. But strategies useful in the 17th century Imperial Court are not useful in translation services.
These useless training practices from ancient times manifest in Chinese practices of intensive word memorization on the one hand, and the “language exchange” practice on another. Memorization was good for Scholar-Officials to pass exams, but as MAK Halliday discovered at Peking University with his Lexicogrammar concept, the smallest in-context meaningful unit is not a word or moneme but, in many cases, a phrase. For example, this textbook suggests that “The Senator from California opposed the motion” has a unit “The Senator from California” that is not subdivided further as a unit of meaning. That is to say, that background for learning to do translation services requires encountering the whole phrase, and this doesn’t occur on word lists.
This has real-world relevance. Consider the 2022 Pacific conference where the phrase Zhongguo Taiwan was translated into China’s Taiwan, much like how Zhongguo Dalu is translated on WeChat into China’s Mainland and not, as native English speakers would say, Mainland China. This caused great hysteria for a very innocuous bit of Mandarin grammar and led to British interest in arming Taiwan with new missile systems. However, similar Chinese grammar like Meiguo Faluolida, i.e., Florida, United States, or Yidali Xixili, i.e., Sicily, Italy, never caused diplomatic problems before—much less an armed response. The basic error is that the Chinese translators, having a memorization-based approach, used the possessive in English, not knowing that it means something totally different to the comma-separated Country, Province. They did not realize that China’s Taiwan and Taiwan, China, or Taiwan in China, from a linguistics sentence analysis perspective, are all distinct and separate units with different meanings. Focused solely on individual word meanings, they treated English grammar as purely syntactic and provoked terror and a multi-nation armed response as a result. This is obviously not what that General intended to do. Every hysterical news headline about someone-in-China-said-such-and-such in these next few years will probably be due to the ubiquitous word list memorization training by translators.
The solution to the first problem is to read and listen to a large variety of highly genuine writings in the second language. Avoid dictionaries and other one-to-one correspondence-type items, and avoid anything related to your own country. The most English-proficient student I had teaching translations was a fairly unmotivated student from a lower-ranked university who had a giant stack of romance novels in her home and had previously only met one foreign person, ever. That’s all it takes to be the best.
Second, the Chinese translator should avoid being in the mindset that you need to “practice” English by finding someone to chat with. This problem was originally highlighted by John Pasden’s classic article, Language Power Struggles. The observed behavior is that numerous learners of English are so interested in “practice” that they will literally battle people interested in learning or speaking Chinese into speaking English. There are numerous language exchange websites where people exchange language practice. Yet, among English speakers’ social groups, clubs, and other social activities, participation by this same exact group is so rare that the media has taken to talking about the so-called “Chinese university student bubble.” On the one hand, people are complaining it’s impossible to learn Mandarin for this reason, and on the other hand, Chinese natives’ contact with English speakers is highly segregated.
The paradox can be explained by observing that these speakers have no motivation to learn about English cultures, rather only wish to capitalize on opportunities to “practice” language skills, which is an activity that is like work. Thus, learners of Mandarin Chinese broadly report being pressured to partake in language exchange-type relationships wherever they go, but the pressure to participate in an obviously pseudoscientific system makes learning Chinese basically impossible, thus, most people just quit. These are not isolated attitudes but rather a very strong, deeply ingrained culture where “the foreigner” has a stereotypical identity of existing for English practice.
Most native English speakers who have taught translation in China I got in touch with report being explicitly asked not to speak Chinese by state institution managers. I have even encountered technology experts with technical degrees who were simply reassigned to teach English despite lacking any background in English teaching. This creates another paradox: China is trying to encourage people to speak more Mandarin Chinese in central government policy, but mandating that “the foreigner,” by definition, is non-Chinese-speaking means that learners of Chinese quickly realize society has made no place for them to continue learning. Even at the level of state policy, there is an obvious quid-pro-quo where the foreigner’s role is to provide English practice.
For the army of language exchange people out there, the approach generally gets no results. If you are trying to find a conversation partner just to converse, you are trying to practice words and grammar in itself, which can get no results. Contemporary language science has long determined that context and social behavior are part of the language itself, and recent studies revealed that facial expressions have the same grammatical processing you’d expect of commas and semicolons. To have skills suitable for translation services, you need to have experience with the society and contexts within which the language appears for the relevant words to have any significant meaning. Only the aspiring translator who participates in the second culture can attain adequate language skills. The creation of a kind of contractual relationship where things are exchanged — language practice, employment, and even romantic relationships — precludes genuine social participation because the social relationship itself is not genuine.
This also requires breaking down another mindset: the idea that being Chinese means you can’t participate in English society or someone being English means they can’t participate in Chinese society. This attitude was first discovered by the lead pastor of the Rutgers Church, the largest Chinese Church in North America when white Americans began joining Chinese groups. This caused so much confusion and concern among the Chinese immigrants, some of which I verified personally in New Jersey, that psychology-trained staff interviewed these white joiners about their motivation to participate in Chinese groups. The participants uniformly expressed something like my notion of the legitimacy of participating in a foreign culture’s group. The organization now actively advocates against the idea that cultural segregation is inevitable. You should, too.
One final thought experiment should illustrate the relevance of all this. Assume that you were in the shoes of the Chinese translator who approached John Pasden in 2005 and did the language power struggle with him, to force Pasden to “practice” English with you but instead of using a bad approach, you followed my suggestions above and just spoke Chinese with Pasden. Would you be better or worse off? You would be WAY better off making friends with Pasden rather than trying to force him into a language exchange. Not only could Pasden point you to English-speaking clubs to participate in, but he could also acquire knowledge of your Chinese language production and tell you the ideal way to translate many expressions from Chinese to English. A translator with such an ally could expect to double their income compared with peers. By shifting your mindset from “exchange” to “participation” and enabling the 2005 John Pasden to participate in Chinese society without being forced out into a language exchange, you would both be able to access English-speaking environments and have a friend with unique knowledge.
Conclusion and Summary
In this article, I introduced a large topic that both traditional attitudes and the university system create a situation where it is impossible for a typical translator to acquire the foundational skills needed for language services. In particular, the short-term, grades-oriented mindset of a University is the opposite of what a professional translator needs. Attaining the skills to provide translation services is a decade-long effort where even noticing progress may take years. The traditional mindset among Chinese translators to do wordlist memorization and language exchange as “practice” not only results in completely absurd social behavior but gets no useful professional results. Instead, look at how to immerse yourself and participate in the second language society. Clients do value skilled translators, and the main reason they are still paying poverty wages to the 99% who are unskilled is that waiting times for certified translators’ calendar openings are too long, so they settle for garbage lacking any alternatives. The idea that the translation services industry is poorly paid is, therefore, a half-truth; unskilled people in any industry are underpaid. Translation is unique in that the 99% lack even very foundational skills. The Chinese translator, therefore, needs to acquire those skills through lifelong learning using the right approaches.
