A consideration noticeably absent from general discussions about legal translation is whether the work can benefit users, and if so, how. Unfortunately, the conversation revolves excessively around whether clients complain or say they are satisfied, usually based on subjective personal opinion, without any consideration of whether the translation results in any benefit or provides any real value. However, the only logical reason a person would spend time or money on a translation is to obtain a benefit that outweighs the cost.
Client Advisory
The value of clear communication is closely tied to the related activity and a quintessential activity is providing business advisory services, such as for setting up a new business venture. Here, a client can theoretically proceed with no expert advisory at all, but doing so can result in oversight or mistakes that result in a variety of financial losses. The higher the caliber of the advisory service, the less clients will lose due to mistakes. As a result, trusted advisors in Shanghai can command about 10,000 RMB per hour for corporate advice. Costly mistakes can follow if the client misunderstands the advice or it is conveyed wrong, mistakes that are acutely visible in translation tasks.
For example, I recently gained some insight while working at Shanghai’s Jiaotong University School of Law to inspect how Chinese lawyers use English to convey translated meanings. Many actually rely on artificial intelligence to write or rewrite legal advice for clients, with the result being that key meanings are changed. Since a highly expert linguistics task is being secretly handed off to AI, and AI is translating Chinese concepts to English that lawyers blindly insert into their advice, the low quality can result in financial losses for the client. I’ve also seen obviously ChatGPT-authored articles appearing on the websites of Chinese “red circle” law firms, which implies that clients paying top-tier prices are getting the same treatment.
For example, many such advice and articles misconstrued “registered capital” as “authorized capital,” which could cause a foreign-owned manufacturing venture in China to miscalculate its funding obligation timeline. Translating a company’s “business activities” as its “business scope” can likewise cause a business to describe its business model to lawyers incorrectly, resulting in a business license that omits a permit-required business activity, forcing regulators to order the company to cease production until the permit is obtained. In my own experience with semiconductor work, a US denial order for a Chinese manufacturing base cost the company over $30 million a month for two months and led to the firing of the CEO, the entire executive team, and the law firm.
Another place I noticed AI causing problems is in calling a “data breach” a “data leak.” In industries such as e-commerce and SaaS, you’re required to set up strong cybersecurity protections to keep things like customer phone numbers, addresses, and purchase records secret. If the security perimeter is breached, that is a “data breach.” On the other hand, a “data leak” is much narrower, comprising things like APIs not using masking and sending unsecured data that pours out like drops from a leaky bucket. The Chinese word for a data breach, xielou (泄漏), uses the root xie (泄), as in xieshui (泄水), which features prominently in various kinds of dam breaches. Here’s a Chinese media snapshot of what this root means. As you can see, the water pressure on this dam is so high that getting in its path would be lethal for a human. Taken very literally, the word means “breach-and-spill.” Your dam is breached, and water spills out.
A translator calling the above “leak” is getting the concept seriously wrong. This can cause problems for technical data advisory, because if advisors warn of a “data leak” in your API and it requires engineer attention to be PRC-compliant, then the data privacy engineer might cut costs by focusing narrowly on whether the API leaks data or not. In this case, what the advisory team means to say is that general perimeter security is needed. If a company makes the wrong decision based on the advice, they could then go on to get a $15,000 fine for compliance failures.
Of course, many companies simply fail to do any data protection work at all, and there are many stories about that in the media. But a company that hires advisors could avoid this fine or negative media coverage about how risky their software is, and could avoid bans in sensitive countries like Italy, Korea, or China. For many ventures, data privacy advisory and legal advice can put you on the track to making high-value decisions. Getting the translation right means you can derive more value from that advisory, avoiding costly problems and mistakes. Here, good translation of this critical information is an enabling factor that allows business to derive more value from the advice.
Contract Negotiation & Performance
The particular value of a negotiated and performed legal contract is that both parties can have a mutual understanding of what they are agreeing to do. In communication, most agreement between people is actually illusionary, and effective and thorough language communication can dispel the illusion of mutual understanding the parties had. In the law, a contract dispute calls on a judge to make a decision about what the contract means and arises when the parties had a totally different interpretation of the same text. Translation multiplies those differences, and the contribution of high-quality translation is to narrow the difference in understanding.
Most contract translations are done by the same lawyers who draft the contracts, which implicates problems. Lawyers usually have very poor second language and translation skills; almost nobody in law school is focusing on those skills but get dragged into it later. Low skill in legal translation work will generally lead to a discrepancy in what each party expects, which can superficially look like dishonesty or an unwillingness to cooperate from the other side and often results in litigation.
A classic case in translated contracts is Frigaliment, which is a cornerstone in law textbooks for teaching contract interpretation principles. In this case, the court mainly interpreted how the word “chicken” is to be construed in an English-speaking environment. However, the court noted that the contract was originally translated from German, where the meaning about what kind of chicken was being bought and sold was clearer in its 1920s context. Here, the parties lacked a very clear mutual understanding about the nature of their contract, which led to litigation.
A clearer contemporary example involving Chinese contracts translated to English is found in a JAW Motors case. Here, the Chinese term hezuo (合作) was translated by lawyers and executives as “cooperate” in the contract and several emails. In American English, a “cooperation agreement” between two companies, as is shown by every contract using that language filed by public companies with the SEC, refers to two independent companies agreeing to invest in the same entity and coordinate their activities in some way.
The lawyers in China did not understand this. So, while the American party thought they were entering into a joint venture and began investing, the Chinese partner expected to only be doing some research projects together. The American company sued, and the Chinese one lost. The Chinese company did not understand why they lost; such is the power of mistranslation to distort understanding. Had the same case been heard in China, the American company would have likely lost, also without understanding why.
Conclusion
As we’ve seen above, translation benefits clients much in the same way that any other kind of professional service benefits them. That is, it enables the business to achieve greater overall results than might have otherwise been possible. Low quality work, when done word for word or by simply asking an AI platform to generate answers, provides results that are confusing or misleading to the end users and deprives them of an opportunity to realize value.
