Chinese-English translations are notorious for their poor, even useless quality. However, there is one essential principle that can be used to ensure Chinese translation services provide good value and good conditions for translators. That principle is equity theory, a key discovery in the field of industrial psychology, which states that equitable treatment is essential for fostering motivation in a business environment. Chinese-English translators currently bend over backward to treat clients inequitably by attempting to minimize the quality of the work they do while maximizing the rates they charge, leading to the inevitable result of useless translations and minimal translator rates. In this article, I’ll explain how to apply equity theory to Chinese-English translation services to get good results in an otherwise highly troubled field.
Equitable Treatment for Career Advancement
There is a typical pattern of behavior among Chinese-English translators who ignore equity theory, which essentially amounts to bilking clients: charging a lot of money while delivering the same shoddy, rushed work. Even if successful in the short-term, industrial psychology predicts that this poor strategy adopted by translators will lead to disasters like falling and worsening pay and work conditions. A good example of this can be found all over the internet in Chinese, where countless translators claim that “foreign clients will pay a lot more than local clients.” In practice, what happens is that these translators contact translation companies or foreign corporations to offer their translation services, and immediately triple their rates. They don’t, however, triple the effort put into their work, nor do they tell their new clients that their regular clients pay just a third of what they do for the same quality of work.
A good analogy in the automotive industry is Toyota. The Toyota Motor Corporation owns and makes the Lexus brand of luxury cars, which are a lot better than typical Toyotas. What would happen if they ignored equity theory and began manufacturing Lexus cars that were the exact same as Toyota cars but more expensive? People would simply stop buying Lexus. A similar principle can be seen at outlet malls, which offer big brand clothes for half the price — but the clothes are actually half the quality as well, to match the price.
Returning to the Chinese-English translator behavior, those translators are simply attempting to sell the exact same thing but at triple the price to unsuspecting customers. That is, Chinese-English translators are trying to minimize quality while simultaneously maximizing prices. Science tells us that this will fail and simply cause what we see now in Chinese-English translations: minimum quality and minimum prices, a third of what the next-lowest region, Africa, is getting. To understand why, we need to take a close look at how equity theory should be applied in the context of Chinese translation services.
Basics of fairness psychology: equity theory
First proposed by John Stacey Adams in 1965, equity theory is an organizational behavior model centered around the idea of fairness in the workplace. Adams’ theory suggests that people’s motivation levels and job satisfaction are largely based on their perception of how fairly they are treated in comparison to their peers.
Put simply, equity theory is an organizational behavior model that explains how people respond to perceived inequities in the workplace. According to this theory, when people perceive that they are being treated unfairly, they experience negative emotions such as anger or resentment and will take action to restore the balance.
The theory itself involves a few key elements: inputs, outcomes, comparisons, and adjustments. Inputs are the resources that individuals bring to the job, such as their skills, education, and experience. Outcomes are the rewards they receive in return, such as salary, recognition, and job satisfaction. Comparisons involve comparing one’s inputs and outcomes to those of others in the same or similar positions. Adjustments involve taking action to restore balance if the perceived inequity is too great.
According to the theory, when people perceive that the inputs and outcomes in their job are balanced, they are motivated to continue performing at their current level. However, when they perceive that their inputs and outcomes are not balanced, they experience negative emotions, such as anger or resentment, and may be motivated to reduce their effort, which for translators usually means packing in fake work from AI tools and lying to their clients. Loss of equity then leads to a collapse in the client-translator relationship.
Organizations can use Adams’ equity theory to promote fairness and motivate employees. To do this, managers must ensure that employees are receiving fair compensation, recognition, and other forms of rewards in comparison to their peers. Adams’ equity theory has been successfully implemented in a number of organizations. For example, Google has implemented a system of “peer bonuses” in which employees can recognize the contributions of their colleagues and reward them with cash bonuses.
In the translation industry, when translators are treated unfairly, they automatically begin reducing the effort put into their translations—this usually means using AI translator and editing tools to automatically generate unreliable translations, and then lying to clients about the quality of the work. If underpaid, harassed, penalized, or abused, as translators often are by their clients, they tend to resort to cheating to restore fairness. When clients are cheated, they usually resort to reducing prices, creating a tit-for-tat in the Chinese translation industry that can explain why there is so much Chinglish and why translators are so poor.
Equity theory describes how people respond to perceived fairness but does not say a lot about how to put a dollar value on that fairness. Since companies are comprised of the people working for them, you can gain some insight into the value of peoples’ contributions by looking at how fair value is calculated when companies are bought and sold.
How Fair Value of a Business is Calculated
Determining the fair value of a company is a complex process usually done by financial analysis experts. When done correctly, the fair value of a company offers investors and stakeholders a comprehensive picture of the company’s worth. There are several methods that can be used to determine fair value, but the most widely accepted approach is the discounted cash flow method. This process involves taking into account the company’s estimated future cash flows and discounting them to their present value, which allows investors and stakeholders to account for the time value of money and future expected cash flows.
It is important to consider the company’s growth potential when determining fair value. This includes analyzing the company’s current and future market position, the potential for expansion, and any potential threats or opportunities. This type of analysis will provide an indication of the company’s future potential to generate revenue and profits.
Finally, it is important to consider the company’s management and personnel when determining its fair value. Analyzing the company’s current and past management, as well as its current personnel, will provide an indication of the company’s ability to execute its business strategy. Additionally, looking at the company’s overall corporate culture and leadership style is also important and offers valuable insight into the company’s commitment to success.
If you read translation industry news sites like Slator, you’ll realize that mergers and acquisitions of translation companies have become a hot topic, actually hotter than translation in itself. Big translation companies buy several little translation companies every year. What exactly are they buying? In the translation company case, since the company has very few assets, they are purchasing the ongoing human capital of the project management team and the translators they work with, in addition to the goodwill (brand and reputation) among clients. If you value the clients’ company and subsidiary value, you can actually get an idea of how translation work contributes to those companies’ value internationally, and therefore how much each translator accounts for in total enterprise value.
Using Equity Theory for Better Chinese Translation Services
In my articles, I maintain that much of China’s current international isolation, poor image polling results, and the failures and catastrophes experienced by its corporations internationally are largely due to the awful quality of its translation work. Behind this is the attempt to violate equity theory among translators who attempt to maximize rates by minimizing translation quality. From the client’s perspective, if translators charge 100% of the market rate, they get back 100% of the value per word. When translators charge 200% of the market rate, clients get 50% of the value they paid for. At 400%, clients receive 25% of the value, and at 1000%, just 10% of the value. Since quality is being minimized, specifically by translators trying to do the worst job they can get away with without being caught, the value never rises from a low baseline and clients keep demanding lower rates from translators as an adjustment reaction predicted by equity theory.
Clients in China are doing the exact same thing, demanding half of the lowest possible fair price. Consequently, translators will simply halve the amount of time and effort they put into the work. This doesn’t apply to just a handful of translators either, it happens with every translator these clients can find to agree. However, not every client is looking for the cheapest work possible. Many use cases, particularly legal translation and financial translation, need highly accurate work. Chinese-English translators could be working at higher rates for these clients if they simply adopted equity theory. Currently, the optimal ROI for a Chinese company using translation occurs at about 400% of the translation rates and corresponding effort used. As a result, these companies are generally crippled when going abroad.
I conducted a small equity theory experiment at a Chinese law school, where they would pay translation students from my class 600% of the fair rate. One-half of the students working for the law school were instructed to use equity theory, and the other half were not. Of the legal terminology items translated by each side, 95% of the terms translated by the non-equity-theory side were nonsense and did not exist anywhere in reality, as verified by corpus linguistics techniques. On the equity theory side, only 10% of the terms were nonsense. The motivation for the translation student was that those terms are too hard and would take excessive effort.
For a translation client needing Chinese-English work, therefore, applying equity theory and working with a translator that also applies equity theory diligently, especially in an environment where ethics is taken seriously, can increase the value of the translation by 17,000%. That is the difference between a translation that is 90% correct vs. one that is only 5% correct.
