My language pair, Chinese<>English, is famous for a culture that causes companies to fall apart and ruin lives. A recent example of this can be seen with the vast destruction of Huawei Corporation and the many innocent Chinese immigrants who had their lives turned upside down after being wrongfully persecuted and detained as part of the China Initiative.
Incidentally, it was my pointing out of inconsistencies in the USA v. Meng Wanzhou deferred prosecution case that helped reveal what really happened and bring down the China Initiative through the insertion of facts in the case — the facts being that a translation company’s interpreter misled an executive into believing that she was qualified to do a legal translation of a document; a document that would otherwise allow US attorneys to apply a law designed to prevent arming terrorist groups with advanced telecommunications devices that could be used for precision targeting and cyber-attacks on US military hardware.
An activist group calling itself a translation movement has also recently risen up among the global Chinese community, an act largely representative of the clandestine civil war now taking place within the Chinese<>English translation community. Some people believe that the problems plaguing the industry, like the translator dishonesty that resulted in USA v. Meng Wanzhou, have now risen to a level constituting both an information war and a clandestine war. The civil war among Chinese translators is really likely something of a culture war, where sparring groups of translators battle for supremacy.
Acknowledge the User as a Moral Subject
The activist group says that the end users of a translation should be acknowledged as a moral subject. That is, the person actually using the translation should be considered to have moral value, and their value as a stakeholder must therefore be considered. Traditionalist translators have long written, and even told me, that what really matters is the correctness of the translation in itself. Many traditionalist translators, however, consider correctness to be the opinion of whoever their teacher or authority figure is, and by extension the translator’s own personal opinion. In his highly insightful writings, linguist Kevin Hendzel wrote about launching a boutique translation company and engaging many translators who I would say fall under the traditionalist category. According to Hendzel, when pressed very hard about why an apparently wrong translation should be used, and paid for, these translators would come up with many excuses, including that translation is “subjective.”
In my own experience, I once worked on a translation for a Chinese company that was to be submitted to the CFIUS and noticed that the translation could potentially cause about $400 billion in damages to this giant company if nobody intervened. I objected to the translation executive that, without informed consent from the CEO, their division was about to send a translation into the CFIUS process that would crush the company. The executive was a traditionalist who said that what matters is the translation being “right” in itself. We, as translators, don’t need to consider anything further than that. Moreover, translation is “subjective” and we can accept a wide variety of types of translation without giving them much thought.
When your house burns down, you burn down with it. Market forces and the realpolitik of the world therefore ensure that if translators are unprofessional and annihilate their own company and its business projects, then they too burn down with the company. If they translate things so badly that they invite attacks from the West, then they too will burn with their country. Consider that federal linguists have pointed out that major events like 9/11 and the Japan atomic bombings were simple issues of translation mistakes — mistakes that led to war and bloodshed in which many of the responsible linguists had families in areas that were firebombed.
Translators are usually socially isolated, and organizations tend to silo them. Hence, most translators are completely oblivious to the gravity of their errors. But, a translation mistake is no small affair. A translation mistake is a firebomb, a nuclear weapon unleashed, a company destroyed by all-powerful regulators, or innocent people persecuted and incarcerated for having committed no worse crime than being from a particular country. The historical records of Nagasaki, Huawei, the Invasion of Iraq, and the China Initiative make this clear. Thus, the industry has taken care to invent new words — localization, transediting, and transcreation — to distinguish between a translation that helps humanity and a translation that harms humanity. Activists therefore believe translation to still be a necessary evil, where the words in a translation are written largely with the blood of its victims.
If A Mistake Was Made, Acknowledge It
The traditionalist group believes that any past translation mistakes made should be honored as a tradition and carried forward. On the other hand, the activist group argues that previous translation errors should be corrected as soon as possible and acknowledged as problematic and misleading. The difference may be in personality type; the traditionalist group exhibits an authoritarian personality that cannot acknowledge challenges to its authority, and therefore cannot recognize past mistakes. A case study of Ford Motor Corporation shows that the authoritarian personality that developed within the company was so severe that “dissenters” would be swiftly squashed; Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater, however, favors decentralized decision-making and was therefore able succeed in 2008 while Ford crumbled, requiring a bailout.
Activists believe that continuing past mistakes is dishonest because readers and users do not know that the translation means something different from what the writer intends. They believe that clients and readers should be privileged above providing fictional recognition for some past translation authority figure’s greatness. From my perspective, the debate looks like the ongoing debate in numerous developed countries regarding whether “cheating” is necessary or if merit should be the sole criterion of success. Advocates for cheating argue that cheating is the only chance they have to achieve upward mobility in a corrupt and unequal society. Since translators mostly come from developing countries where pro-cheating movements also exist, we can reasonably expect a widespread pro-cheating mentality among translators.
Organizational Culture
Currently, most corporate translation departments aggressively attack dissenters, which is what most organizations in general do as famously complained of by Ray Dalio and Warren Buffet. Translation companies and their insourced departments are no exception. The story is very familiar to what occurred at companies like Enron: out of a dozen managers willing to do something unethical and dangerous, one is bound to be a dissenter. When I met Enron executive Cliff Baxter in Houston, he seemed like someone who had solid business smarts but also a balanced, solid ethical opinion. I am sure that he voiced his opinion whenever necessary, since other members of his family said business-smart, but ethical things, all the time. Where is Baxter today? He was found dead in his car with a gunshot to the head, in a case ruled as a suicide.
The behavior of translators, when I worked in-house in translation at both large LSPs and corporate translation departments, was very similar to what I saw happening at Enron. About 90% of these translators were on board with unethical behavior, and maybe 10% dissented very strongly. Naturally, 90% had various means by which to attack dissenters, and the organization lacked any method by which dissenting opinions could break out. In the CFIUS case, even as an external partner and so-called “expert,” executives urged me to consider unethical translator behavior as normal—to the extent they would get to keep their own jobs. In the case of that executive, what happened in his case was that he did not intervene closely in subordinates’ activity and they developed a culture of groupthink that led to a major commercial failure. What unites both cases is that they failed to develop a team culture of translator honesty, but in the end, it cost them the client and later their jobs.
Those familiar with me know that I train and counsel translation teams, including for a lot of Fortune 500 companies, and also teach college classes. Over the years, I’ve noticed that when you start training translators and make it easy for them to cheat on training assignments, you tend to see a statistical pattern of behavior very different from the 90% / 10% split you see in corporations. Approximately 35-40% of translators cheat at the very start of their training, 50-55% do a mediocre job, and 10% work extremely hard to do a great job. These cheaters are extremely dedicated to cheating: you can’t really attack cheaters because, if you do, they will start libel campaigns against you, protest against you, and do extreme things like jump off the roof of your office with a suicide note blaming you. The kinds of things they do in defense of their perceived right to cheat are as extreme as the Vietnam War protestors who spoke out against murdering children. And, statistically, these cheaters are more likely to use suicide as a form of protest than the Vietnam War protestors ever were.
This is extreme behavior, and it explains why the corporate cohort is composed of 90% cheaters. If anyone is so dedicated to the lifestyle of cheating that they are willing to stage street protests or martyr themselves to defend their right to cheat, then a dissenter stands no chance in a typical corporate environment. When a culture of corruption takes root, the managers generally cannot root out cheaters—they will convert the whole team into cheaters.
Solutions
My suggestion? Apply Professor Clifford Geertz’s techniques to develop organizational culture among teams. In China, Geertz is famous for having discovered the Chinese cultural norm of involution and developing the techniques used in China today to re-engineer culture, as seen at Alibaba. With patient guidance and intervention, a new organizational culture that achieves the ideal results for clients at the same or lower costs is fully possible in business.
The key to achieving this is to revise assumptions that translator productivity follows a bell curve shape. Rather, it follows a multimodal curve initially in school, with three groups, cheaters, average performers, and deep learners, each producing three bell curves on a single plot. Once careers begin, translator productivity follows a heavy-tailed distribution where a tiny group has outstanding performance and the majority have very low performance. By 15 years into a career, the high performers have attained ATA or CIOL certification, and their income and productivity are about 600% of the majority cohort.
Organizational leaders can break through this cultural barrier by simply empowering dissenters and protecting them from retaliation from the pro-cheating cohort. In particular, translators who think that there is something wrong with the business-as-usual of defective translation work have a strong motivation to attain superior skills and certifications. Like dissenters, certified translators are actually marginalized in organizational culture. In fact, most big translation companies do their utmost to steer you away from certified and sworn translators, not unlike a law firm steering you away from licensed attorneys so that paralegals can represent you in court. Online translator directories even tend to place certification credentials in the margins, making users work hard to find them. For instance, the popular ProZ website offers users no option to search for a translator certified in a particular language pair.
Thus, companies have a good option for introducing much-needed dissenting opinions and rebooting their translators’ culture: certified translators, marginalized in the industry for being good at translation, are a powerful tool for companies wishing to reverse the culture of incompetence.
