False conventions in Chinese Translation

In a way reminiscent of 19^th-century sham science, modern-day translators of Chinese have collectively come up with pseudoscientific translation standards based purely on their subjective opinion. By subjective, I refer to the fact that translators, and indeed bilingual people, develop a subjective concept of what the components of their second language mean that differs significantly from the conventions among native speakers of that language. In a previous post, I showed how entire textbooks by Chinese authors teach readers how to produce standardized Chinglish. This, along with other malpractices, has manifested the creation of a variety of “world Englishes,” such as Chinglish and Euro English, and even what Victor Mair calls “Zhonglish” — a grammatically correct variety of English where the phrases make no sense. Furthermore, systemic social dysfunction in governmental institutions in many countries gives their own bilinguals a false impression that the English they learn is “standard English.” Concerningly, numerous dishonest translation agencies, and even corrupt corporate translation departments, routinely use falsification techniques to exclude any evidence about what would be an objectively correct legal or corporate translation.

Objective vs Subjective Languages

Before the danger of subjectivity in legal translation can be adequately described, you need to know something about how subjectivity in language and translation generally differs from objectivity. In linguistics, there are two polar opposites on what can constitute a language: at one end is the accepted convention, essentially a societal agreement about what expressions mean, and at the other is idiolect, which refers to the language of a particular person. Between these two poles along this spectrum are a huge variety of individual language practices, including language variants such as Chinglish, where there does exist a convention about what words in English mean, but that convention is entirely different from the convention that exists in countries that natively speak English. In these false conventions about language, most bilinguals believe that they are using true standard English, but this is an illusion caused by the three unscientific factors I’ll cover below. Thus, these false conventions emerge, come to dominate regions, and can easily be identified while few believers in these false conventions recognize the difference between their English and standard written English.

Personal experience is the first, and chief, factor that creates a false convention. Bilingual people who successfully interact with members of their second language community, or can read materials, typically experience a significant amount of interference from their native language. The majority of learners who become linguists, nonetheless, think of and represent themselves as having a perfect command of both the languages they speak, even if this is totally false to observers. Statistically, it’s basically impossible. The European Union and US Federal Government have been studying language proficiency and testing many people, and the number of people who can be proven to have zero native language interference is less than 5 linguists out of everyone in the world—the legendary ILR4 second language ILR5 native language level. Even the very best linguists in the world will test at just the ILR4 level. So, anyone not aware of their serious linguistic shortcomings as a linguist is living in a fantasy.

The second factor creating false conventions is the acts of governments worldwide, which has led to the proliferation of dozens of regional English variants from countries where English is not spoken natively. The problem has two big prongs: public schools in middle/low-income areas generally do a poor job, even in the US, let alone in developing countries. Second, young students are easily indoctrinated, and putting them into a system with a bunch of overconfident but undertrained English teachers winds up indoctrinating them into believing that their own government’s English education system is doing a great job. These English teachers aren’t saying, “now come children, come learn incorrect English,” but rather the grading system, which defines the English teacher as the standard of correctness and gives grading authority, indoctrinates students into believing this content must be correct.

Such rigorous, early-age, and extensive indoctrination means many countries’ societies do not seem to recognize just how incorrect the local English being taught is. For example, videos showing English teachers in Pakistan teaching broken English to children are widespread on Chinese social media. Talk show hosts love to ridicule Indian English in China. Yet the English variants in Pakistan and India are generally considered superior to the Chinglish widely used in China. This is totally normal, however, because as an Indo-European language, the difficulty of crossing that cultural barrier is much lower and the ancient commonality with Europe is still there despite the fantastic richness and uniqueness of the region’s cultures. Likewise, websites ridiculing Chinglish get lots of traffic from countries all over the world, including countries that have standardized poor English and indoctrinated their children to believe such poor English is standard. More concerningly, Chinese students going on to become translators get even worse indoctrination by being given A’s for producing what is basically incorrect English. On his blog, Sinosplice, John Pasden even noted that his native-English-speaking daughter was coming back from school with Chinglish overwriting her native English, proving the incredible power of this false authority in China.

The third factor that creates false subjective conventions of English different from objective usages in standard written English is what linguists call “accommodation” (see study here). To summarize the academic work on this subject very briefly, numerous highly respected linguistics professors traced a pattern of behavior towards non-standard Englishes in academia they called accommodation. The idea here is highly intuitive: academics from non-English speaking regions come and speak incorrect English with native speakers, and the native speakers of English learn to understand their incorrect expressions as a dialect of English. The native speakers are actually the ones doing most of the learning due to a language phenomenon known as fossilization—the non-native’s English gets “set in stone” and they lose the ability to correct their English usage (without a lot of professional help, anyway). For academic discourse, most linguistics experts believe that accommodation in the academic context greatly improves the efficacy of academic work and dialog, and citation counts increase significantly when accommodation is used.

Despite being highly desired by participants, accommodation in business and business services is not always in the organization’s best interest. A Harvard Business Review article investigated whether an English-only policy with accommodation or the use of conference interpreters improved the efficacy of foreign corporate executives at meetings. The writer found that the use of conference interpreters got better results; and if you just run the numbers on how much a CEO is worth compared to how much an AIIC member costs in comparison (peanuts), the argument is pretty obvious. Yet accommodation and English-only policies remain commonplace, possibly because they give these executives a big ego boost. For example, back in 2013, Chinese media back reported that Alibaba CEO Jack Ma’s English in interviews during Alibaba’s go-public phase was highly fluent and smooth, whereas American English commentators made no such mention and quite a lot of them ridiculed Ma’s ineptness. Elon Musk was even filmed making a really strange face at Ma Yun speaking English. Ma can speak English, but maybe at the ILR3 level, which means he has a lot of errors and distortions in his meaning. Nonetheless, the prestige and ego boost back home was obvious. The key point here is that conversation participants are being very polite in-person because they are filtering out what they really think. However, people without filters, like the autistic Elon Musk or internet commentators, reveal that the communication is experiencing a serious problem.

For a linguist or Chinese translator, on top of the first two factors, being accommodated so much creates a phenomenon seen in Chinese translation, and reportedly elsewhere, such as the German or French translators who created “Euro English,” that this English production is totally perfect. The self-assessments that give them the sense of authority to do things like create English dialects like Chinglish or Euro English are totally based on highly misleading subjective factors, but they are never confronted with reality because linguists study “world Englishes” as a comprehensive phenomenon without ever assessing individual linguists’ work. Moreover, since fellow linguists are also following the same false conventions, they give each other positive feedback and ratings for conformity with the false conventions and will even attack usage conforming to standard written English as non-conforming.

Moreover, these three factors form a very large circular positive feedback loop. English teachers incorporate translations performed by translators with a false sense of authority into their English teachings. The students of that English education then go on to interact with native speakers and deepen the fossilization of their existing errors while developing, through interaction, an idiolect of English that suffers huge first-language interference. Next, they develop a sense of authority by interacting with native English speakers in professional environments, where they are in reality being accommodated without the native English speaker telling them. Many of these people become linguists, and the cycle begins all over again.

The result is that the development of a false convention incorrectly regarded to be standard written English, where the meaning of English words and phrases, in addition to the meaning implied by grammatical structures, is different from modern standard English. Linguists then begin to associate their false beliefs about modern standard English with their own native language and develop a set of false translation equivalences where the meaning in one source text is totally different from its target, yet when back-translated, the translation looks incorrect. In the case of Chinese, Professor Victor Mair famously called this “Zhonglish,” a grammatically correct version of English where the words in combination do not make sense to a native speaker.

In a genuine expert translation, the translator would use the various tools of linguistics—not ESL books or bilingual dictionaries, which are usually flawed—to determine how people in both the source and target language communities understand what each text truly means. Professor Catherine Way wrote a very good paper on how these techniques can be employed in legal translation, though it is safe to say that most legal translation is accomplished subjectively, not objectively.

Conclusion

The existence of a variety of fake English variants created by translators—such as Chinglish and Euro English—is a poison that few translators acknowledge, but nonetheless, dominate the translated discourse of entire countries and regions. Any translator who works into their second language is likely seriously affected, even without knowing it. How does this problem occur, and how can it be avoided? The primary driving factor for translators is their trust in unverified personal experience, placing what they think their previous second-language experience stands for, rather than considering the evidence about what language is truly intended to mean. Secondly, these problems are institutionalized and magnified in English training programs in numerous countries which, to cut costs and appease political constituents, involve dominant non-native English staff who teach the incorrect version of the language. Third is the practice of “accommodation,” where native English speakers do their best to work with the flawed English variant and filter out their negative appraisals of the conversation partner’s English ability. This gives a false sense of overconfidence to speakers, which I will cover in detail in a future article.