The Chinese translation market is dominated by translators that go extremely fast, as shown by how prices for Mandarin translation are the lowest in the world despite translators maintaining a decent white-collar income. For example, a Shanghai “red circle” law firm’s translator claims to make an income of 350RMB per hour, while offering a rate of 450RMB per 1000 words. This is roughly three times faster than European translators, even though translating between Chinese and other languages is three times as hard as translating between European languages. “The intensity of Chinese translation is much higher than abroad,” the law firm translator explains.
However, when you look at SEC filings by Chinese corporations, they are usually full of nonsense and Chinglish, and the SEC has even threatened to delist some of these companies for this very issue. In this article, I want to introduce ideas from the slow movement (see Wikipedia) that suggests “fast translation” is harmful not only to clients but also to translators. You can think of it like fast food (burgers) vs. Slow food (gourmet roast duck or beef brisket); fast food, while quick and convenient, is ultimately deadly to the consumer and the same applies to fast translation.
The situation in the translation industry very much mirrors the fast food industry’s detrimental effects on consumers as portrayed in the documentary Supersize Me. While fast food production processes may look good on the surface, they are still essentially persuading customers to kill themselves. Similarly, fast translation is also a form of business suicide and can explain many Chinese company disasters abroad; once documented by the American Translators Association with its sanction of a company named OneHourTranslation. Following the Supersize Me model, despite the risks it poses to consumers, fast translation, like fast food, remains very successful. Today, European translation company project managers often promise fast translation to clients, while at the same time apologizing to freelance translators about being rushed yet again and being asked (yet again) to put their clients at risk in the name of money.
An Audit Story
I audit quite a few translations for companies and organizations and, as a result, have insight into what translators are doing out in society. One instructive audit story occurred when a university hired graduate student translators to help work on a book translation deemed very critical to this university’s mission. The audit revealed that students were, on average, actually doing about 150 words per hour or about 1,200 words per day—equivalent to approximately 400 Yuan per day. For people not familiar with the labor market in China, 400 Yuan per day is about three to four times what a translation intern could expect to earn if paid by the day at an on-site internship job. That is to say, if the university (or a corporation) were to offer the same student 75 Yuan per 1000-word segment, then they would still readily say “yes,” and this is exactly what happens in translation markets. Many clients offer larger sums of money with the idea that this will improve quality. What typical freelance translators do, however, is ignore what the client’s particular needs are and instead focus on what they subjectively feel is adequate.
After auditing the translation, the subsequent quality management steps resulted in the university publishing the book getting their money’s worth and, if measured by the hour, the graduate student translators making about the same as if they were working freelance on an hourly rate. Specifically, the student translators had totally skipped various quality assurance and terminology management practices that I always teach are essential to the translation process. To put it less kindly, most academic terminology used in the book was simply made up using word-for-word translations, and no time or effort was put into determining what the translation or source text “really” meant.
The first remedial step for the student translators was to have them produce a glossary of all the terminology items, along with the basis for which they believed the target translation into English would be correct. This revealed that 75% of the terminology items were just made up. These were not novel inventions of terminology—these were traditional legal terms that all had published equivalents being used in academic legal texts in the English-speaking world. The next step, therefore, was to verify that these proposed (made-up) terms were correct. Learning the terminology of a specialized field like this is not something that happens overnight—nor can you just invent a pidgin English vocabulary to represent what you intend to mean. The students would therefore have to research and determine what the correct terms and phrases used by real English-speaking writers are.
The students’ behavior of rushing the translation actually put the project’s possible outcomes in jeopardy. Typically, a law professor who also publishes things is rewarded based on their publication and citation, that is, their academic impact. If the translators working on translating a law article simply invent an entirely new vocabulary just so that can work less, English-speaking academics wouldn’t be able to understand or even find their work. Using an apple and oranges comparison, if a biologist writes a research paper about Apples, and the translator calls it “Oranges, then the other Apples researchers won’t even be able to find the paper or even realize it’s really about Apples.
A more real-world comparison of apples-called-oranges might be the number of books on ancient China talking about “ordinances” issued by a ruler when these are actually decrees in China; this happened because lots of Chinese archaeologists were educated in Jerusalem and got familiar with a word in ancient Hebrew translated as “ordinance” (hammishpatim, הַמִּשְׁפָּטִים֙). To save time, they simply assumed that the word would be fitting because it occurred during the same time period—however, the governance and legal system in China was much different to that of the Near East.
The process of taking all of these mislabeled parts of the translation and making them accurate was very time-consuming for the students. How time-consuming? One of the students just quit the project and refused to work—I suggested to the client requesting the audit that her pay be reduced to the fair market rate (60 RMB/1000 words) and the remaining budget reapportioned to correcting the work. China takes service work abandonment pretty seriously; sometimes lawyers even send police after translators who take client money and disappear, as Chinese law does treat abandonment or falsification as a serious criminal matter. After all of the terms had been correctly looked up and a 300RMB/1000 word rate applied, the other students’ per-day earnings were brought down to about 150RMB. This reduced the falsification rate found in a terminology audit from 75% down to 0%. While the resulting translation would need a lot of work and revision to be publishable—probably doubling or tripling the costs—the fundamentals were in place.
In terms of fairness, clients need non-sham work and translators need to be paid fairly. A huge problem illustrated by this example is that when translators start working, they don’t think about what is fair to the client. They only think about what is good for themselves and what feels comfortable. As a result, clients use their only weapon to bring the deal back into fairness—reducing pay. As a result, translator pay in China has gotten absurdly low and translators have become focused on minimizing any investment into client work. Consequently, Chinglish dominates translation production.
The above story reveals that translators have another weapon other than price cuts for translators—auditing. A skilled auditor can reveal what kind of value the translation creates for a client and measure the labor value invested in the project with reasonable accuracy, sufficient enough to make actionable decisions. Translators who are honest, like the above students, and realize the error of their way are usually willing to do right by the client. This brings us to an important question: how can legal translators and clients treat each other more fairly?
Create Value Fast by Working Slow
I want to take the specific context of this story and talk about what the relationship between translators and their clients should be, as an ideal. Currently, when I audit translations for companies and even governments, I usually find that most of what translators, whether outsourced or in-house, produce is basically comprised of machine translation or word-for-word translation guesswork. Maybe 20% of the vocabulary used in these projects would be retained if the translator were, like in the above story, made to verify that each of the words used is correct. The situation is akin to what I once saw in a stairwell painted in a Shanghai condominium complex: the contractor had painted the first two floors of each building and left floors three to six unpainted. Local residents described this as doing work that focuses only on what’s noticeable to supervisors. However, the half-incomplete maintenance did not improve property values, because prospective purchasers were actually visiting the unpainted floors. Thus, for a 70% reduction in costs, the condominium complex manager achieved 0% of the desired value (property values). Likewise, these legal translators are also focusing on doing work where inaccuracies would not be noticed, but the end result and all the remaining inaccuracies consistently zero out the value of their translation.
There is plenty of good evidence that translators are routinely zeroing out the value of any work they do. Like in other sectors, companies doing business with China have learned to work around translators, in many well-known ways. The most interesting way is that most doing business with China know that what is written on a manufacturing specifications sheet and what the factory produces are totally different things. Thus, manufacturers trading with China are used to doing very rigorous quality inspections. These same people swear that trying to enforce a breach of contract in China is a waste of time and that physical inspections are the only way to succeed. For many years, American LLCs have avoided forming subsidiaries in China because of the known translation issues. Instead, they form an entity in Hong Kong to use as their China subsidiary. In particular, translators have a hard time translating the word “member” from English to Chinese and they therefore do it word for word. In proper Chinglish, the LLC word “member” would be written as Shareholder (Partner), and Chinese regulators in Shanghai claim to have no problem recognizing that the word “Member” is a way of saying “shareholder or partner” in US legalese. Clients in their own experience know quite well that translators are obstructing, not facilitating, cross-border business. Thus, business translation rates keep falling to these bizarrely low levels that reflect the lack of value created.
As the story case indicates, translators can, in fact, create value for clients by adopting a “slow translation” process and they can be paid appropriate and fair translation rates. This can be seen with hypothetical examples based on things going on in China. For example, imagine that you have a journeyman legal translator in Shanghai, who would fairly be worth 100RMB/hour out in the market, tasked to work on a translation related to M&A warranties and representations. Suppose the client offers a rate that reflects the importance of this translation in ensuring global auditors can ensure the second closing price is calculated correctly, and so sets a price of 1,400RMB per 1000 Chinese characters (and not 70). Supposing the relevant document is 4,000 words long, how long should the journeyman spend working on it? Overall, while a typical translator would complete this in about 6 hours, the fair rate based on client requirements for value is about 56 hours over the course of a week. At 6 hours, the document will be a mere formality pretending due diligence was done as the CEO expected, but it won’t tell them anything useful. At 56 hours, the reader would be able to tell that salespeople created misleading sales numbers to inflate the company’s valuation. I’ve worked on many cases exactly like this. And I also know that many years ago in the mid-90s, Japanese and Chinese translators were also charging rates like the above; and this was before the 2000s, when professionalism in the translation industry broke down after new translation companies modeled on Enron-style business logic began encouraging translation fraud.
When the translator starts working on this project in an environment of trust and professionalism, what steps should follow? The first thing is that this project will be very hard for a translator of this experience level to do correctly without an immense amount of research, so the legal translator, in this case, is much like the one in the above story about the students. Determining all of the relationships between Chinese and English vocabulary that could be used to describe inflating sales volumes—particularly informal and insider terms—would take this translator a long time. Spending an hour or two to figure out a single term out of a list of 30 items is completely realistic. Until the translator has acquired the relevant knowledge, this step cannot be skipped. Incidentally, this is exactly how it works in the law firm world. Something that a 30-year corporate lawyer knows intuitively might be something that a 2nd-year translator would need to spend all weekend researching just to figure out. Those legal ethics CLEs love to point out that lawyers working outside an area of expertise need to put in extra effort. Legal translators should also take note. The current practice of junior legal translators being faster than experienced legal translators, something observed in academic studies and throughout the industry, is not a realistic way to achieve correct translations. Like the condominium painters, it achieves the appearance of a correct translation but actually has zero value. Thus, our hypothetical journeyman legal translator would put in the required time.
When the translation is delivered to the client, what happens then? In the real-life version of this story, the client, a Fortune 500 company, through its lawyers discovered the value-inflating scheme and clawed back about 50 million RMB ($7.2 million) in China during the second closing for the acquisition of the company. While the translation alone was not able to achieve that result, combined with a corporate lawyer of 40 years experience, it was able to drive work to reveal problems with the acquisition that the Shanghai law firm could not resolve since lawyers in that office lacked those decades of Wall Street expertise. How much would it be worth for that company in hindsight to pay that translator? In order to save millions, we can see that the corporate lawyer was paid about $1,200 per hour to work on the matter for several weeks, and I think most CEOs would see this as a good investment. Translators are no different from auditors or lawyers, they can create value for clients and can be rewarded for that value. However, translators need to stop thinking about themselves as just a cost center that produces no benefit, but rather as a value center that generates as much value as possible.
