What is the purpose of a translation? In my line of work, which predominantly involves business and legal translations, the answer is relatively simple: a good translation is one that achieves the goal of the translation buyer. The most important consideration is the purpose the buyer wants the translation to achieve, meaning that while a good business translation might not preserve all aspects of its source text, it should certainly provide the same information as the source text to a reader. As a result, certain expressions might not be translated equivalently word-for-word. For example, sentences might be restructured to present information in a different order, redundant words might be omitted, or phrases might be added to explicitly describe what is only implied in the source text.
These changes are necessary because of the different cultural knowledge possessed by each language audience. The meaning implied in one language can be lost through literal word-for-word translations, with a clear example being Chinese idioms – these would make no sense to an English reader when translated word-for-word. However, even seemingly mundane Chinese expressions can be mistranslated if a word-for-word translation approach is adopted (sometimes with severe consequences), as many of these expressions would still only make sense to Chinese speakers with the required knowledge of the Chinese cultural context. Another example might be marketing slogans that rely heavily on wordplay or unique cultural connotations. When translated into English, these expressions should be replaced by a different English expression with the same meaning in a different English cultural context. A good case study is the 2016 WeChat North America launch that got very little traction; commentators blamed this on the excessively direct rendering of idioms in WeChat’s stickers feature, making it hard for users to decipher.
At the end of the day, translation firms are in the business of providing services to translation clients, who use translations to serve real business needs. Unlike in the past, when translation was often a purely academic pursuit, commercial translations today need to be able to serve the needs of translation clients requiring specific services. In this context, it is not the original purpose of the source document that a translator should consider as most important, but the translation client’s purpose.
The Skopos Theory of Translation
This translation philosophy is known as the Skopos Theory, proposed by German linguistics professor Dr. Hans Vermeer in 1978. Skopos is the Greek word for “purpose,” and his theory presents the idea that a translated document should, first and foremost, consider the purpose for which the translation would be used. This approach might seem obvious, especially when it comes to legal and business translations. Still, translation theory before this time largely focused on preserving the faithfulness of the source text above all else, even if doing so would result in a translation that cannot be properly understood by its intended audience.
While an argument can still be made for adopting this older approach for religious and literary texts, the Skopos Theory method is much more effective for translating documents a business wants the audience to understand instantly. It’s also more consistent with the idea of translation being a service provided to clients, as it tells us to prioritize the client’s purpose for requesting a translation. Say a Chinese client comes to me with a PowerPoint presentation for a business proposal they want to present to their English-speaking business partners. The value of my translation would then be judged based on how accurately their business partners can understand the key business information presented in the presentation rather than by how faithfully I have preserved each aspect of the source text (for example, metaphors about tigers and dragons). To ensure that the information presented would be understood by an English-speaking audience with little to no knowledge of Chinese culture and language, I would need to restructure the source text and make necessary and reasonable changes.
A good real-world example of this scenario is found in the case USA v. Meng Wanzhou, where a Huawei executive requested an interpreter translate a PowerPoint presentation, which they did word-for-word. Each word was rendered very faithfully and in the exact same position as the original, yet the bank, HSBC, and later prosecutors understood the company named Skycom as a third party to Huawei (which constitutes financial fraud) when it was actually an affiliate. Meng was eventually released on a downgraded criminal charge with new facts about her reliance on an interpreter, showing how formalistic faithfulness to the source text led to a major international incident with serious consequences
The Three Rules of Skopos Theory
Vermeer breaks down the Skopos Theory into three main rules, which should be followed in order of importance: the Skopos rule, the Coherence rule, and the Fidelity Rule.
The Skopos Rule
In his 1984 book on Skopos Theory, Vermeer states that the first and most important rule of Skopos is that a translation needs to serve its intended purpose, whatever that may be. A simplification of his theory could be summarized as “the ends justify the means,” meaning that translators would need to make decisions on how to interpret and present the source text in a way that allows the translation to be effectively used to fulfill this purpose. However, in doing so, the translator is given free rein to translate the source text as freely or as faithfully as they deem necessary. This also means that the same source text can be translated in multiple different ways to serve different purposes.
The Coherence Rule
After ensuring that the Skopos Rule is satisfied, the translator should make their translation coherent to its audience. Simply put, the audience must be able to interpret the translation with their existing knowledge. This ties into what I often describe as translators needing to understand the “discourse community” of whichever audience they’re translating for before tackling a translation for a legal or business contract. The translator should first read and familiarize themselves with similar contracts written by native speakers of the target language to understand the type of language used for that specific type of document. The English vocabulary and expressions employed in a legal contract, for example, would be very different from the English used in a regular conversation.
The Fidelity Rule
Once the two rules above are satisfied, the translator can then concern themselves with making the translation as faithful as possible to the original source text. Unlike older translation theories, which often place fidelity, or faithfulness, as the top priority for a translation, Vermeer proposes that faithfulness should be considered secondary to the purpose and coherence of a translation. Under the Skopos Theory, the hierarchy of these three rules makes it clear that the faithfulness of a translation can and should be sacrificed if trying to maintain every aspect of the source text hurts the translation’s purpose or makes it impossible to be properly understood by the translation’s target audience. Today, most translation companies recognize the importance of balancing fidelity with “transparency,” another term describing how well your target audience understands your translation.
Skopos Theory Serves Business and Legal Translation Clients
Skopos Theory can be effectively applied to the majority of business and legal translation requests. Any translation company would communicate with their translation clients to first determine where and how their translation would be used before taking on a project, pinning down the purpose of a translation and its intended audience through a translation brief. Business and legal documents are also often straightforward and very specific in their messaging and purpose, making it much easier for the Skopos Theory to be applied. And finally, the goals of the Skopos Theory align neatly with that of translation clients, who request a translation precisely because they have some specific use for a translated work. Following the Skopos Theory allows a translator to see that their translation would be used to provide some service to the client, guiding them in shaping the translation to fulfill this purpose.
Let’s consider the application of Skopos Theory to specific types of translation commonly requested by companies doing business internationally. In the business development context, most companies today publish marketing material such as articles, blog posts, whitepapers, and product introductions that describe their specific products. In this case, Skopos Theory recommends that the business development material be adapted as much as needed to achieve better audience engagement while still remaining truthful.
A very fascinating case study is the engagement data for the China-related legal marketing website, China Law Blog, which features contributions from both Chinese and American writers. The Chinese writers closely conform to the original Chinese, while the American writers very closely adapt their work to their target reader despite discussing the same content — with the Chinese lawyers’ knowledge being far more authoritative than the American lawyers’. Nonetheless, the work of these American lawyers gets the most audience engagement and views, as they have adapted the message in a way that is much more understandable to the audience, despite these American lawyers not having as good legal knowledge as their PRC attorney colleagues. Most news publishers use a process called “Transediting” that emphasizes the significant amount of adaptation needed. However, most American companies in China still use poorly adapted original messages and Anglicized Chinese terminology differing from local (and stronger) competitors.
Apart from business development needs, a company might also require a translation due to business litigation issues. For example, in the course of their international business operations, they might find themselves needing to file a lawsuit or arbitration against their partner in an English-speaking forum. Such cases would require translation of the entire case’s English materials into Chinese to obtain Ministry of Justice approval for service of process to enforce the judgment. Likewise, it would also require translation of the relevant Chinese-language materials into English to be used as certified translations before the court. In this case, the goal of the translation is to accurately communicate all the relevant legal facts within the case in English to enable the forum to make an appropriate judgment. A translation error to your detriment would mean you lose the case and all chances of recovery. If there is a big translation error to your benefit, some foreign governments may consider it an unlawful sanction and respond with a countermeasure directly against your company. For example, in recent years, some companies in China, such as semiconductor firms and fashion retailers, have been subject to measures suddenly prohibiting all sales within the country.
This approach to translation, also called the “Receiver Oriented Approach” by Professor Susan Sarcevic, is actually a successful challenge to Vermeer’s original Skopos Theory that is nonetheless “within the framework” of Vermeer and other modern translators. This “advanced” Skopos approach seems obvious yet is actually very different from how most past and even current legal translators work. Initially, legal translation was almost completely literal and based on the idea that only literal translation could preserve the letter of the law. In what Sarcevic calls “traditional translational” approaches, “faithfulness” in translation referred to a kind of formal equivalence that resulted in translated legal texts readers would not be able to understand. However, she points out that such an approach was eventually proven to be misguided. Instead, a legal translation should be faithful to the function or purpose of the law being translated, which an overly literal translation often fails to achieve. As one exasperated law professor whose students were mystified by legal translations said at a PRC legal conference, “Perhaps it’s really time to consider whether these texts should be understandable to readers.”
Sarcevic’s disagreement with Vermeer seems to primarily be with Vermeer’s belief that Skopos Theory supports multiple different translations for the same insurance contract, whereas Sarcevic thinks there should only be one correct result. Having read Sarcevic’s theory, I believe Vermeer is correct to say that multiple translation approaches do exist. For example, a contract translated for an internal corporate investigation can be translated differently than the same contract in litigation presented to courts to help English speakers identify and track down leads on white-collar crime. However, when the DOJ used this approach in the USA v. Huawei indictment, I felt that they inserted unproven facts and essentially allowed the FBI’s translators to act as judge, jury, and executioner. When translating for a jury, a translator should not “help” the jury make a discovery not proven by the Mandarin evidence, yet this is totally appropriate for helping an internal investigation unearth things like, for example, an acquiree corporation’s violation of M&A warranties and representations through the use of “creative” contract arrangements.
Legal Translators Need Legal Knowledge
However, translators are required to have a deep understanding of the purpose and effect of laws and legislation to translate them based on Sarcevic’s criteria that legal translations need to be understandable in the context of a different legal system. In her 2016 paper on legal translation, Catherine Way claims that most legal translation students are often unable to effectively translate legal documents due to a lack of real-life experience with these “alien” social events. Traditionally, legal translation training focuses on interpreting text, particularly legal terminology. Way, however, suggests that a “discourse analysis approach” should be adopted: students should be taught how these social events actually take place in real life, giving proper context to the legal document they are tasked to translate. After the events described in the documents have been made clear to the translators, they should then look for similar texts describing parallel events in the target language and legal system and produce a translation based on these parallel texts.
The Skopos Theory, however, is just one of many translation theories and has received its fair share of criticism. For instance, following the Skopos Theory when translating a novel would mean that much of the original text’s cultural nuances and source language flavor is supplanted with the translator’s own ideology and subjective opinion. In fact, professor Emily Wilson made headlines by pointing out that numerous themes in the Odyssey were later supplanted with translators’ patriarchal ideology. In contrast, Ken Liu’s Hugo award-winning translation style engages the reader in a conversation directly with the translator through footnotes, making it a better approach for understanding Chinese culture and better suited for business cases where culture is on the menu, such as for restaurant chains.
Conclusion
Producing an effective translation requires a translator to balance how closely a translated text follows the source document (Fidelity) with Transparency. Vermeer’s Skopos Theory provides valuable insight into how these two often contradictory requirements should be weighed: define the purpose for the translation and make sure that your translation is as faithful or as transparent as necessary to most effectively achieve this purpose.
While Vermeer intended for Skopos to be a general theory applicable to all “translational actions,” it works best for translations with a clear and specific intended purpose — not literary works whose purpose is hard to pin down. Fortunately, commercial translations, like the business and legal translations CBL works with, often do fall neatly into this category.
Essentially, Skopos Theory provides a roadmap guiding translators on how to provide good client services, which is what we do here at CBL: first, understand exactly how our clients intend to use their requested translation, and then craft an effective translation able to create value by fulfilling this exact purpose.
