One of the major difficulties in translating between Chinese and English is the lack of exact equivalent terms in both languages, a result of the cultures’ different histories. This is especially true for legal concepts and terminology. Take the Chinese term zhengshou (征收), for example. Picking the first word in the dictionary, the term very roughly means “seize.” In context, however, it can refer to a plethora of different government actions, from the collecting of taxes and import duties to the seizing of land. Unlike in most Western countries, the term also does not differentiate between the illegitimate expropriation of land without compensation and the exercise of eminent domain or other legal rights to claim private land. These incoherent translations result from translator attempts to ignore the history behind the language, because of their dogmatic belief in the universal grammar theory.
Universal Grammar Theory is Wrong
Most translators in the Chinese translation community I encounter are applying an ancient linguistic theory that arose in the 13th century and was later made famous by Chomsky. The Universal Grammar theory states that humans have a universal predisposition to language and that all languages possess linguistic universals – for example, the idea that all languages have nouns and verbs would be one such universal. There is, however, strong evidence showing that languages that evolve from cultures highly different from one another do not share many features considered to be universal. In his study on the Amazonian language Pirahã, cognitive science professor David Everett found that the tribal language lacked any words describing color, numbers, or religious concepts and attributed this lack to different cultural values between Pirahã speakers and speakers of other languages.
An erroneous application of the universal grammar theory in the eminent domain context can be seen in encyclopedias or common resources describing the activity globally. For example, Wikipedia says that eminent domain is called “expropriation” in a number of non-English-speaking countries. For European languages, this could be debatable, as the French word is “expropriation” and in Spanish, “expropiación.” These encyclopedias are typically inaccurate when they say the United States uses eminent domain and not simultaneously expropriation, because the United States uses all of expropriation, eminent domain, and condemnation simultaneously. A Mexican investor in Houston facing federal eminent domain of a greenfield for a COVID camp is facing eminent domain under the federal Declaration of Taking Act, afforded a right to a tribunal appeal for “expropriation” under the USCMA, and has a Constitutional claim for a “takings.” These are not mutually exclusive terms, as translators using the universals theory would erroneously believe when doing word-for-word translations. Rather, these are words that have different linguistic indexicality in English and encompass a different set of legal matters, for example, administrative proceedings versus constitutional law matters.
In Chinese, the word zhengshou is a much more extreme example than the Spanish word “expropiación,” where there is, at least, a common language family and some relationship between the words. This is a word that developed totally independently of the Indo-European language family and thus has no equivalent meaning. When translators go to encyclopedias and say, in China “we call eminent domain as expropriation,” this is not only false, it is verifiably false. You can go to China and go to a hundred different towns and talk to a thousand different land condemnation officials: none of them have heard the word “expropriation.” They do not call what they do “expropriation.” They all speak Chinese and have their own distinct tradition influencing how they use the language, even if they have developed legal practices virtually identical to other places due to the needs associated with developing a modern economy.
In much the same way, the Chinese language lacks many of the nuanced English words we have for describing personal rights, legal actions, and the exercise of power by authorities. As indicated above, there are perhaps a dozen or so ways to describe the government taking ownership of private land in English: civil forfeiture, eminent domain, seizure, regulatory takings, expropriation, appropriation, and so on, all of which have slightly different legal implications. In Chinese, most of these actions are simply described by the single term zhengshou, and it is up to the translator to figure out which English term is most appropriate based on context. When a translator ignores or is not competent enough to understand this context and relies on a bilingual dictionary to translate terms word for word, what you typically end up with is grammatically correct nonsense or Chinglish.
This lack of equivalency makes direct word-for-word translations from Chinese to English incoherent at best and actively misleading at worst. At the core of the issue, the Chinese language and the English language evolved based on two very different cultures which emphasize different values – the Chinese have an extremely elaborate system of etiquette with defined rules for different social situations. So, the Chinese language possesses a similarly extensive vocabulary to describe things like how one should greet other people of higher or lower social standing than you in public and how seating arrangements should be made for a dinner. In English, we have a culture of personal rights reaching back all the way to the signing of the Magna Carta, and so have language which describes personal and legal rights much more precisely than Chinese.
In English, Label is Legitimacy
In English-speaking countries, we have a wide vocabulary to describe personal rights because the police and other government authorities need to refer to specific laws and reasoning to justify their actions. In other words, to make their exercise of power legitimate, officials are required to label their actions based on a law. Watch any US police show, and you can often see the cops throwing around legal labels when making an arrest or searching a car or apartment. Based on my experience living in China, Chinese cops absolutely do not do any of this.
Applied to land expropriation, while there is only one word for this activity in Chinese, English has a wide variety of vocabulary items that describe the activity precisely, a result of the Magna Carta tradition carried forward for almost a millennium. For example, “takings” refers to government expropriation as a constitutional rights issue; “expropriation” is a more catch-all term used in Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs). Eminent domain is the power of a state government to take land, whereas the specific exercise of that power is called a condemnation.
In fact, there has also never been a need to precisely describe land takings legal labels in Chinese because authorities in China generally do not need to justify their actions through law. The expansive power to exercise authority is also reflected in how the Chinese government conducts land takings. Traditionally, in the last millennia of Chinese history, the government takings power was expansive and not limited by any law. Unlike in English-speaking countries, authority often assumes that it will be obeyed without needing to explicitly justify its actions through a specific law. This, in turn, makes the precise and diverse range of vocabulary describing personal rights and government actions in English largely unnecessary and non-existent in Chinese. In 2004, at the urging of international experts, such as the World Bank’s visits to China policymakers, China began phasing in international best practices for property registration and protection, but without the millennia of cultural experience England had that would lead to the development of a highly context-specific vocabulary
These different cultural values have thus led to many terms in both languages for which there simply is not a direct equivalent in the other language. When describing the actions taken by Chinese government officials or police, the lack of different Chinese expressions for nuances in how authority is exercised can make perfectly lawful exercises of power sound illegitimate or unlawful when translated. For example, instead of saying that the Chinese government exercised the eminent domain process, a translator might say that the land was expropriated, implying that a civil rights violation has taken place. While there might occasionally be malicious intent behind these translation errors, like how the language used in Chinese documents to describe Chinese government activities in Xinjiang was twisted in English translations, errors also often come about simply due to the lack of different Chinese words to describe each type of government land seizure.
The Takeaway
Cultural differences between China and English-speaking countries mean that many words are not universal between the two languages. Some legal concepts in English simply do not exist in Chinese, and a proper translation relies on the translator being able to fully understand a legal text instead of just being capable enough to blindly consult a bilingual dictionary.
