Legal translators often exhibit overconfidence usually associated with superheroes, which ultimately leads to severe mistakes that border on professional malpractice. In a previous article, I described how translators develop beliefs in “false conventions” about the meaning of words in English. The implication of such false conventions is that the translator communities providing these translations jointly develop false and pseudoscientific beliefs about not just what translations are correct, but even the inherent meaning of words in their second language. Overconfidence further exacerbates I false convention phenomenon, which can be seen where translators, having received the several forms of false validation I covered previously, develop a strong and almost religious belief about the false conventions underlying their translation practices. As a result, they not only provide objectively incorrect translations but will even aggressively attack correct translations on the sole basis that they contradict their personal opinions.
The Severity of Overconfidence
How bad is overconfidence in legal translation? It’s so bad that it leads otherwise highly intelligent and qualified lawyers to second-guess the knowledge of well-trained and respected experts. I have even heard academics in China argue that the Chinese media’s English is the “true correct English” in some cases, whereas outfits like Reuters and the New York Times are using English ”incorrectly.” In Juliette Scott’s excellent book Legal Translation Outsourced, she collected survey responses where professionally certified and sworn translators in Europe were told by clients that their translations were wrong, based on reasons like “I showed the translation to my wife and she said it is wrong.” In a previous series on Attorney Misconceptions About Certified Translation, I even found that a highly experienced international lawyer claimed that his undergraduate intern, one “Emily,” was qualified to assess the quality of sworn European translators, just because she was currently majoring in translation.
In light of the above false convention issue, I believe it is safe to infer that, in both of these cases, the analysis was actually just based on a subjective belief in a false convention about standard written English, and that the expert translators’ work was, in fact, correct.
I would venture to guess that at one time or another, most legal translation experts have had their expertise second-guessed by otherwise very prestigious and highly competent law firms solely on the basis of “my wife says” or “Emily the Intern says…” type analysis. There are even allegations from a Chinese-American that numerous top law firms charged with tasks like preventing secret military technology from being smuggled abroad demonstrated the intelligence of the lobotomized asylum patients of the last century when it came to translation.
How Incompetence is Institutionalized
As documented in Scott’s book and elsewhere, incompetence in the field of legal translation is something that’s highly institutionalized today. Only a minority of translators are certified to do translation, and translation agencies are actively steering clients away from certified translators in an effort to cut costs. While this is a highly deceptive, and therefore unethical, practice, translation industry intermediaries have found a means by which to fully institutionalize the false conventions used in legal translation and justify using incompetent translators following a method that falsely claims that translations based on false conventions are “true and accurate.” This is a very simple method known as consensus, which involves picking several amateur translators and having them take a Lord of the Flies-style vote against a single expert or certified translator. Translation agencies then use this as evidence that the quality of translations produced by experts or certified translators is no better than the average uncertified translator.
Translation agencies, and indeed even many internal translation departments, leverage cherry-picked data in a consensus method for the same reason: it helps cut costs. A translation company doing this will, for example, contact a number of linguists for a client and select 6 uncertified translators with no industry background. At the same time, they’ll also bring on board a single certified translator with a background in the industry who specializes in this kind of work. The uncertified translators’ experience in, for example, securities contracts, consists in having looked words up in a dictionary to match into an English document without knowing whether the dictionary’s suggestions are correct. The expert might actually know what all of these words and phrases actually mean, having studied the industry and its terminology closely, and after carefully verifying that, linguistically, the proposed expressions in a translation mean the same thing as the source.
Thus, “accurate” to the expert refers to “means the same thing” whereas “accurate” for the uncertified translators means “appears in the dictionary and other people agree with me.” No academic researcher of legal translation has ever suggested that the dictionary approach is actually accurate. During a project, an expert highly experienced in an industry will arrive at legal or industry terminology that is different from that in the dictionary. How do agencies and internal translation departments resolve this? Almost the same way—a vote will be taken among the 6 poorly-trained translators, and they will thus overrule the lone expert by a majority vote. Not unlike what’s done in the plot of Lord of the Flies. Any expertise that any expert has in this sort of case will always and deliberately be ignored.
More fascinating is the fact that internal departments use this approach too, at least according to whistleblowers who know me. Their motivations are a bit different; the manager wants to cut costs and is under pressure from upper management. Therefore, if an incorrect dictionary entry takes 30 seconds and verifying the correct translation takes 5 minutes, then 30 seconds is also superior. Machine translation tends to follow dictionaries too, so this is a good method for managers to hit their cost KPIs. A second factor is that people who get into the translation business are mostly pretty lazy, and they hate studying; if there is one translator very dedicated to working hard and excelling who joins the team, their discovery of other colleagues’ incorrect work product could expose the whole team as incompetent. Thus, the outlier who develops expertise will come under huge pressure to keep their mouth shut and follow the incorrect translation approach used by colleagues.
The above two contexts of incompetence also interact. If a company outsources its translations to an agency cutting costs using a Lord of the Flies-style vote to exclude expert opinion, that company will often verify that the sham vote is correct, by showing the files to a client and asking for their internal translators’ opinions. Since both groups are both in a race to the bottom and follow the same false conventions, the client side will also approve the translation agency’s work. Even if the company boss does something like show the translation to his wife, since the wife also learns from the false conventions, they, too, will go with the sham translation. More crucially is that the translation agency will always conceal the outlier expert’s concerns about the inaccuracy of the translation. Even if the expert were to talk to the in-house people, that expertise would likely be second-guessed by the office politics that plague internal translator performance. The same phenomena are also observed with even ordinary native-speaker translators’ accounts of English; non-native speakers will successfully vote to use a majority non-native version. Hence, all of those varieties of world Englishes were able to proliferate the world—driven by the sham authority and influence of these translators.
Quite remarkably, most people observing the legal translation industry agree that the quality is awful and inadequate; people even go to jail and companies are sanctioned into bankruptcy over little misunderstandings. However, most companies believe “our” translators are all doing a good job: bad translations are someone else’s problem. And just like H&M when it got shut down across China for saying the wrong thing (i.e., the wrong thing when translated to Chinese, but totally OK in English), these companies don’t even notice what translation errors are causing their problems.
Conclusion
When I founded CBL Translations, I had an ideal in my mind that, like in other professions—law, medicine, and accounting for example—expertise could be front and center in driving client service, and not deliberately marginalized in favor of incorrect answers. However, in most translation practices, overconfidence and excessive belief in the validity of one’s own personal experience, as validated through peer approval and native speakers’ accommodation, takes the front seat in the translation service process. The solution to the problem above is deceptively simple: let expertise lead the translation project and be honest with clients. That’s a remarkably hard goal to achieve in the language services industry thanks to huge defects in the training process. However, I do believe that there are both clients who value expertise and linguists who are committed to genuine expertise by putting objectivity first, ahead of unverified subjective opinion. I know because I’ve met them.
