Mandarin translators are notorious for violating the native speaker principle, resulting in the “Chinglish” seen in Chinese translations, but even acceptable-sounding translations that violate the principle are typically wrong.
The native speaker principle states that a professional translator only translates into their native tongue, and is a rule endorsed by the American Translators Association. In my reading of translation theory and in my professional experience, there are very good reasons for this principle, especially for Mandarin.
Translating from your native language is relatively easy: looking up the meaning of a foreign word in front of you is quick; it’s a “known unknown.” A translator can usually easily think of the equivalent meaning in their native language; however, translators rarely know their second language well enough to think of an equivalent after checking a monolingual dictionary. Answers in bilingual dictionaries are usually incorrect. In my field, legal translation, acquiring native-level knowledge of the “language of the law” will require many years of study and experience, both of law and of language. If interpreting legal terminology is a challenge to the layperson, writing it correctly on behalf of an attorney should be an impossible task for a novice.
Part of the reason why so much learning is needed for the translator is that when working with Chinese, the legal translator will have no effective assistance from the form documents that drive so much of legal work. That makes tasks that would otherwise be very easy in your second language enormously difficult. I have kept up with numerous very successful attorneys at big law firms whose first language is Chinese. When they started law school, they expected to fail in the American market, but I assured them they had nothing to worry about. Why have they succeeded so well despite language barriers?
These ESL corporate lawyers can apply their immense intelligence and talent to rapidly learn and imitate the correct English from form language to rely on when doing drafting assignments and have libraries of educational materials to rely upon. When completing due diligence or doing research, they can summarize existing English by recycling vocabulary and phrases. All of the terminology and grammar are right there, provided for the attorney. When writing anything into the second language, even if English, in such a context, the reader’s short-term memory will be loaded with the relevant terms and grammar for the task. Thus, I have seen law students who fail university English proficiency tests be waived into law school and graduate in the top third of their class.
Existing document resources are unavailable when translating a Chinese legal document to English. None of the terms in the original will even bear a resemblance to the target, and even something that seems similar on the surface may turn out to be an entirely different concept from the alleged equivalent English concept that comes to mind—what is called “false friends.” English legal forms generally do not match up with what the Mandarin is trying to say, and the client will almost never have reference documents showing how to phrase the English. The translator has to rely largely upon their knowledge and experience of how English should work in such cases if they wish to translate anything coherently from Chinese to English.
When faced with such challenges, the ESL translator can resort to two different tactics to translate the document to English. The most common strategy is to submit work they know is wrong. The second, more ideal strategy that I will cover first is to do adequate research to determine how to make these statements in English. In the legal field, doing this kind of research is possible using existing forms and treatises, and using the SEC’s EDGAR database of existing contracts. The process is very time consuming and clients never want to pay by the hour for that research. Translators at large, prestigious law firms in Shanghai have told me that their firms require translators to rush everything in order to control cost for clients, and supervisors encourage discreet use of free machine translation tools to accomplish translation tasks. Even if they spend more time on research, very few Chinese translators have been trained in research, particularly legal research and very few can figure out how to do identify relevant English resources. A result is that many large international law firms’ China offices have a reputation for deploying internal translators who offer a slightly corrected version of Google Translate—which is of no use and possibly misleading to the English-speaking readers.
In practice, the very best Chinese-to-English translators collaborate with native Chinese speakers in the same manner that all leading Chinese-to-English translators followed since the Jesuits 500 years ago, but with the work product being essentially a native English work product. The top institutions in China (particularly mine), also follow this practice where possible.
In many developing countries with authoritarian cultures, when management makes unrealistic demands, providers tend to produce substandard or incorrect work product for the customer deliberately. A particularly obvious manifestation of this pattern was where an official report showed about 40% of English teachers in China are fake, many hailing from Russia, which has become the subject of a parody by the Mamahuhu comedy group. Beyond that, China has an extremely high reported incidence of academic fraud—outright faked academic works. (primarily outside of its excellent top-ranked schools) In the Chinese legal translation field, there are dictionaries and English textbooks that are filled with incorrect language, filling page after page with completely false information about English. Even the authoritative legal translation text urges the use of the term “nonuplicate” in counterparts clauses. Thus, a typical non-native translator will be unequipped to do anything but produce obviously incorrect translation results.
The way that such a student will approach an English sentence using such an educational model is to first create a syntax scaffold for the English words, with places for each part of speech. Then, each Chinese word is converted to an English one based on 1-to-1 equivalence, ignoring the fact that English words actually have a variety of different meanings in varied circumstances, and then placed in that scaffolding. The 1-1 equivalence dictionary fails to grasp that different words in English have different meanings, such as “liability” instead of “responsibility” or “statute” instead of “law.” For legal vocabulary, these 1-to-1 equivalence tables are often entirely wrong, the product of fake work done by dishonest academics many years ago. Due to poor early English education focused largely around rote memorization, these translators are often unaware the English language has an entirely independent terminology and linguistic structure that historically has nothing to do with Chinese. Instead, they rationalize the nonsense produced by 1-to-1 translation as reflecting different “ways of thinking” in different cultures. However, outside science and technology, where the vocabulary is highly objective, you are unlikely to find many Chinese words with a 1-to-1 correspondence to English.
The non-native translator working from Chinese to English using the ‘faking it’ approach will do the above, but because legal texts are so much more difficult, the approach will be pumped up in steroids. For many lesser-used words, the English equivalents put into dictionaries were entirely random words typed into a list. The translators will look for those lists first and use completely wrong choices without doing further due diligence, and for anything they can’t figure out, they will begin making words up. And often, they think making up words in English is appropriate because it works for them in Chinese. However, English readers get misled by their made-up phrases.
In other languages that are closer to English, such as European languages, the native speaker principle is preferred for other more basic reasons. For example, translating Civil Law German into English is a whole different specialty from translating Common Law English into German. Those civil law concepts will have appropriate English expressions, but there will not always be direct equivalents. For example, the common law liquidated damages clause has different manifestations in civil law countries, such as the clause penale. Thus, by specializing in one language direction, those translators spend all of their time mastering the nuances of expressing, for example, German civil law concepts into English. Returning to the Chinese translators working in both directions, their false belief in a 1-to-1 equivalence between both languages leads them to create misleading translations.
For example, in most commercial arrangements, the parties stipulate to damages in a contract that in general will aim to amount to 100% of the actual damages (liquidated damages) and extra 30% as a penalty. However, working in both directions has confused many Chinese legal translators into thinking that the Chinese concept is the exact equivalent of liquidated damages, even though this is plainly inaccurate. Looking at the math, Liquidated Damages requires estimating 100% of the damages, which is much lower than the Chinese standard, which targets 130%–allowing for a mildly punitive component. These legal translators would recognize the error if they just did the math, but since they are basically faking their work to the point where it becomes habitual, they have not verified anything, even after repeating the same mistakes for so many years on end that they forgot they were faking it to begin with.
Many of Mandarin translators will diligently research and complete the translation projects in a second language, but this comes at a great financial cost. Clients do not want to pay money for someone to go out and spend many dozens of hours researching how to translate something correctly. As a result, most clients who cannot find an adequate native speaker are quite willing to compromise by having someone do the project outside their field of specialization. Many times, this is expedient and makes sense, especially if you are not materially relying on the translation and there is little risk of problems arising out of that. However, it is my own practice and that of most native English speaking translators to not violate such a rule because native Chinese speaking translators are relatively plentiful and situations, where we need to go against our own values, are quite uncommon.
Conclusion
Translators working into their second language from Chinese rarely do a good job, and this is the source of those bizarre Chinglish translations so widely seen in the media. You categorically cannot rely on these kinds of inaccurate translations—even ones that seem slightly off are immensely misleading. Fortunately, there is an easy solution: insist on selecting a qualified Mandarin translator who translates only into their native language and field of expertise.
