Involution, the “folding inward” of social norms, has caused a curious phenomenon: native English-speaking newcomers to the Chinese-English translation industry face bizarre and aggressive behavior from industry translation managers. After the initial shock, they quickly begin to see Chinese-English translation as being basically broken and accomplishing nothing meaningful — with even their most cursory of attempts at translation essentially turning into acts of grace. They usually feel this way because the Chinese translation company demanded they cut their rates in half, and they charitably agreed. When they get started doing translation work for local companies, native English-speaking Chinese-English translators are likely to be bombarded with insults on their intelligence, angry screeds decrying the low quality of their work, and demands to redo everything to the client’s satisfaction or go unpaid. Thus, the translation is twice the effort for half the pay Spanish-English translators receive, for a language three times as hard. Thus, from what the translator can see, the payoff of learning Chinese is twelve times lower than that of Spanish!
Translators at this juncture are likely to see a second variant of bizarre behavior emerge, one that can only be blamed on involution. The client, or its translation manager, will begin sending completely broken, incoherent English documents over to the translator and demand these be “polished.” The translation client will insist that, unlike the translator’s “broken” translations, what they are sending is high quality, excellent work from an outstanding translator who truly knows the ins and outs of both languages! “Be very careful not to damage the translation,” the translator is warned. On closer inspection, however, the document is actually full of bizarre, made-up phrases: a product of Google Translate followed by a round of Grammarly’s free vocabulary enhancer.
Both of these scenarios, while appearing totally illogical, are a product of a phenomenon that has become a buzzword in China lately, that of involution. However, the term involution isn’t a Chinese concept in itself, but rather the application of a sociology theory by an American anthropologist working in Asia, Clifford Geertz.
What Geertz says about involution in Asia
Geertz’s work focused on the concept of “thick description,” which he argued was necessary to truly understand a culture. By thick description, Geertz meant that one must consider all the various elements of a culture, including language, beliefs, values, and practices when trying to understand a social action or event. This concept of thick description has also been adopted by scholars of involution, who argue that it is necessary to take into account all the various cultural elements in order to truly understand the complexity of involution. Geertz further argued that culture is a complex web of symbols and meanings, and that it is through the involution process that the complexity of culture is maintained and passed down from generation to generation.
In particular, Geertz pointed out that culture is an interactive process that is constantly being reshaped and reformed by its participants. He argued that culture is not static, but rather a dynamic process in which different elements are constantly interacting and influencing each other. For example, different cultural elements like language, beliefs, and values are constantly being modified and reshaped through the process of involution.
In his research on Javanese culture, Geertz observed the Javanese people were caught in a cycle of involution characterized by a lack of economic growth and a static social system. He noted that the Javanese had become so accustomed to the traditional system of interconnected social relationships that they were unable to take advantage of the many economic opportunities available to them. This cycle of involution had been perpetuated by centuries of poverty and the lack of a functioning economy, and Geertz believed that the Javanese would need to embrace modernization and create a functioning economy in order to break free of this cycle.
According to Geertz, this particular cycle stemmed from a combination of political, economic, and cultural factors. A long period of colonial rule had created a closed system of government in which the rulers had total control over the economic resources of the region, which ultimately led to a situation where there was an unequal distribution of wealth; with the ruling classes benefiting from the exploitation of the lower classes. At the same time, Geertz argued that the culture of Java had also become increasingly inward-looking and resistant to change, noting a gradual decline in the openness to external influences and a rise in the importance of local customs and beliefs.
For instance, communal ownership tenure systems were reinforced in sugarcane production areas, which allowed the villages to assign use rights to certain individuals (which could be long-term and inheritable). Additionally, villages maintained some control over the complex rotation schemes, thus giving the sugar mills access to the land while still allowing peasant families to use it for subsistence farming. Other forms of control employed by these villages included subcontracting, jobbing, and work exchange. According to Geertz, one of the major consequences of this type of agrarian relationship was that agricultural products could be distributed relatively evenly throughout the population, ensuring that everyone had access to the resources they needed to sustain themselves.
As the population grew and resources remained limited, however, Javanese villages did not separate into classes of rich landowners and vulnerable peasants. Instead, they maintained a high level of social and economic equality by cutting the economic benefits into innumerable tiny pieces, which Benjamin White characterized as “shared poverty.” This was done by combining complex, labor-intensive farming methods with agrarian relationships to offer more job opportunities and agricultural goods to the growing population, thus providing every person with a place, however small, in the overall system.
Involution in Chinese translation
During China’s famous “go out” campaign, which intended to launch Chinese brands worldwide but resulted in a number of major flops and even scandals, I consulted for several translation companies on their attempts to get big Chinese corporations to accept good English. In each scenario, the client-translator relationship progressed along the lines of involution into what White described as the “shared poverty” result of Javanese involution. If we step back and take a look at the Chinese translation industry as a whole, we can see that it’s not much different from Javanese subsistence agriculture. The Chinese translation enterprise is largely characterized by a situation where each participant is attempting to ensure a fair distribution of resources by introducing additional normative complexity in the form of unwritten rules that, while ensuring even distribution, hobble rather than propel productivity.
As it does in many other sectors of the Asian economy, the model employed by the Chinese translation industry gives way to a kind of “tai chi” tug of war where each participant is fighting to maintain their own fairness. Translators generally attempt to maximize their interest through “quality fade,” that is, by minimizing the quality of the translation work to increase the speed at which it’s completed (and thus the translators’ hourly earnings). Nowadays, this typically involves having AI tools and popular machine translation platforms, like Google Translate, do most, if not all of the work for them. Normativity about the lack of responsibility for various points of knowledge is then introduced to push back on demands to spend more time on the translation. On the client side, the use of “time waster” demands and things like massive manuals of requirements automatically generated by a computer, which if not followed create an excuse to not pay, combined with extremely arcane payment requirements tied to more excuses to not pay, pull back to ensure fairness on their side.
If inspected experimentally, you will find that each participant only uses complex, intensified, and involution-characterized techniques to ensure fairness for themselves. Translators are stabilizing at about a $750/month income, the translation managers similarly, and clients stabilizing costs at about 5 cents per word. Participants won’t try to grab a bigger slice of the pie than is fair, even if they have the chance. However, the productivity of the Chinese translator remains flat for their entire lives, that is, the work they accomplish is minimally improved over a machine translation. This is enough to allow foreign products to sell in China but largely ruins the consumer experience. The famously poor sales of foreign brands and products in China has produced many conspiracy theories over the years, but extremely low-quality translations are no doubt a key and overlooked factor.
The involution of economic relationships in the Chinese-English translation industry can explain much of the bizarre behavior that greets native English-speaking translators arriving in China with a desire to help. When I helped arbitrate and mediate on many disputes related to goods and services provided to Chinese companies, my observation was that the Chinese corporations assumed the native English-speaking translators were exhibiting involution characteristic behaviors, when most come to the industry full of professionalism and idealism. Moreover, since good English does not conform to the client’s biases about what is an accurate rendering of the original—they see it as “smooth grammar and fancy words”—any objective mistakes like missing a word, no matter how small, is seized on as proof that the translator is deliberately doing shoddy work. In my own observation of all the international big flops, racism, and illegality controversies involving big Chinese corporations throughout the years, most of these were clearly driven by putting the native English-speaking team into an involution relationship.
Even some relatively small errors by Chinglish standards are likely to cause hysteria and demands for thousands of dollars of compensation. For example, one translator replaced the word “this year” with the specific year (i.e., 2020) in a consumer finance document. When the same document was sent out the following year without anyone reading the English version to ensure it remains correct, the translator took all the blame. Not only that, but the company also had its lawyer write a demand letter. This particular translator is actually a highly respected conference interpreter and was correct in that vague dates should not be appearing in letters that constitute legal documents, but the Google Translate copiers would all insist on using “this year” — a word-for-word translation.
The native English-speaking translators, under the hailstorm of criticism for using good English, then begin finding various ways with which to emulate Chinglish to appease their Chinese clients. I have even seen people using pidgin English, lolcats English, and Yoda English, but without great effect, because none of these can replicate Chinglish, which is also a language that resulted through the process of involution and has extremely complex rules. In fact, Chinglish is a more complex language than English. Only a native Chinese speaker who received an education in Chinglish in China would be capable of emulating it well enough to appease local corporations’ translation managers. Thus, those managers wind up turning to the process of hiring someone to produce “human translations,” i.e., copy-paste from Google Translate, for the native English speaker to lightly “polish.” The process of involution takes idealistic native English translators who produce excellent work and chains them to an immovable mass of Chinglish that will produce no good for anyone. The involuted Chinese-English translation economy produces no value for anyone but instead ensures each participant enjoys their fair share of poverty.
