Translation departments in China have long relied on language polishing, despite academic findings that it is pseudoscientific and unreliable. In particular, esteemed linguist and science expert Victor Mair has identified “Xinhua News English” as a distinct strain of English to emerge in China, but lacking insider access has not been able to identify the source of the phenomenon. Having worked with many corporations and institutions, I have traced the phenomena identified by Mair to its source in an ideology about language polishing as the solution to criticisms of Chinglish. The dysfunction has been allowed to fester for many years thanks to outdated and ineffective organizational practices that turned language production into a kind of power struggle. In this article, I’ll trace the origin of the phenomenon and how to effectively solve it in the translation process.
What is Xinhua News English?
An expert like Victor Mair characterizing Xinhua English as a separate dialect in a classic article should be enough to discredit the theory in itself:
“In “Xinhua English and Zhonglish,” I discussed the phenomenon of a peculiar style of English that has developed in China. Since it is not outrageously incorrect in terms of grammar or grossly unidiomatic, this type of English cannot be labeled Chinglish. On the other hand, this particular style of English, which we may call Xinhua English or New China News English, is distinctive enough to be recognizable as an emerging dialect.”
As can be readily seen from Mair’s description, it would seem that Xinhua News English should be discredited. Nevertheless, in the fifteen years since the article appeared and gained prominence, Xinhua continues to use the nonsensical “solemn representations” language Mair originally analyzed and criticized. This points to deeply entrenched, institutionalized resistance to using understandable English. Complaints about the language quality in official Chinese translations have been constant for decades. Behaviorally, language polishing within translation offices was a reaction to perceived defects in translation quality. Chinese translation companies insist their work is fully perfect despite negative feedback, concluding that, while the translation is perfect, it is not shiny enough, and thus requires polishing. The overall process is emblematic of typical office politics, where individuals seek praise for themselves even if it means undermining the organization’s mission and goals.
The Groupthink Strikes Back
If you’ve read my article on groupthink, you may be aware by now that I believe groupthink is basically the central, Achilles’ heel in translation quality dysfunction. Historically, groupthink not only dominated the language services process behind Chinese English-language media, but it also waged trench warfare against comprehensible English. The recorded history on this is very scant, but I did have a chance to talk to a retired, 80-something-year-old former translation policy maker in Beijing. According to his adamant opinion, formed back when he involved foreign subject matter experts on law and policy translation for China (Who I assume spoke no Chinese), there is simply an inseparable “cultural divide” separating East and West and, as the saying goes, never the twain shall meet.
Investigating the history further over the years, I found sparse testimonial comments in blog posts, media articles, and even on Quora, with some first-person accounts of how language was being produced during the 1980s and 1990s in the lead-up to Xinhua English. As I understand from the fragmentary conversation, and corroborated by personal observation, Chinese translation companies hired a cadre of “language polishers” native in English, who were subsequently directed to “polish” translations done by the translation department. The language polishers would correct the documents, and their edited versions were sent back over to the translation department for further correction, which often involved undoing a lot of corrections involving terminology. The translators and writers would work in restricted parts of the building at these publications and had no contact with the English language editors working there. Instead, a middleman, usually a project manager, shuffled documents back and forth and answered any questions.
This charade continued for many years, with the English editors convinced of the Chinglish narrative and the translators quite certain of the “ignorant foreigner” narrative. Many native English speakers did in fact travel to China to learn Mandarin, yet, for the most part, involving them in translations seems to have been out of the question; they then returned back home to work in government, academia, or media. Over a period of about 30 years, between 1980 to 2010, some academics in the United States noticed distinctive variants of Chinglish emerging, none of which made sense at all. From the perspective of academia, separated from China by so many thousands of miles and lacking access to Chinese institutions, a distinct version of Chinglish seemed to be emerging. However, the –ish suffix implies that someone is actually using this language or that it is something known as a language form to any single person. However, Chinglish never existed as such.
In practice, the two dueling departments of editors and translators formed their own versions of groupthink and carved out their own territorial turf. No single translator or single editor actually endorsed the truth of the document, rather it reflected something of a compromise. Despite the obvious absurdity of the situation, the practice nonetheless persists today in what seems to be the majority of companies, law firms, and even government agencies throughout China. There are a few outliers: state media outlet Sixth Tone, ByteDance, and Shein have received international praise for using easily understandable, correct English that means what the author intends it to mean. However, I still constantly see college students being directed to these English-polished publications as models for what good English comprises, and textbooks are filled with China-translated language-polished articles. Quite a lot of people are investing great effort into learning a non-existent Chinglish language, the product of a clash between translators and editors in different offices. Tens of thousands of people seem to be investing huge effort into something that has no value, in a manner that is completely uncoordinated and largely based on hearsay and misunderstandings. For academics, it’s a fascinating case study of social dysfunction.
What Can Be Done?
Three common social phenomena that I’ve written about in the past combine to create highly dysfunctional translation and English as a second language regimes. Each of them needs to be disrupted. The first and foremost is groupthink, which results in a kind of cult around idols, leading to authority-based translations; the idolization cult holds up the false master as a model for emulation and everyone follows it religiously. Idol cult worship works well for K-Pop marketing, but not so much for science-based professional work.
The second phenomenon is siloing, which occurs in all organizations but especially in command-and-control models where workers interact only with people in their own departments and do not share knowledge. When language polishing is used, the editor silo typically develops a different set of beliefs about linguistics than the translation department. Instead of sharing and reconciling knowledge, the two departments use the document itself as a battleground. This phenomenon is not helped at all by the fact that the cheapest English speakers possible are typically used.
Third, the language services department generally develops a hierarchy of power rather than a hierarchy of knowledge, thereby functioning as a power struggle organization instead of a learning organization. Office politics dominates the organization, with powers backed by sham knowledge making the decisions. What this usually means is that someone with a very strong belief in what’s actually Chinglish is calling the shots on translations. The end result is Xinhua News English, the variant of Chinglish born of power struggles. Despite all this, there are a few things that a Chinese translation company can do to improve service—and clients should look for these best practices as well.
If the three phenomena of groupthink, siloing, and power hierarchies combine to create an organization that worships false linguistics knowledge like a religion, then doing the exact opposite can achieve superior results. Start with cross-functional teams. Instead of lumping translators together in one department and editors in another and totally isolating and marginalizing native English translators outside the organization, create cross-functional teams. These teams should be made up of translators native in both languages collaborating with subject matter expert editors and revisers, all focused on one language. This approach creates four or five different types of cross-functioning roles. If you consider the knowledge overlap among two people with different native language combinations (such as ILR5 + ILR3, and the reverse), their knowledge sets overlap a lot like a Venn diagram. Each linguist knows perhaps 8,000 words of the other’s native language, but there is a non-overlapping body of knowledge comprising 20,000 more advanced words not known to the other. However, it is not enough to simply throw a bunch of random linguists into a room together, as they will soon begin to fight for domination. Instead, highly expert, senior linguists need to serve in roles similar to law partners in law firms or principals in consulting firms—one can expect that they will have knowledge of greater scope than their subordinates combined.
This raises a question: if the subordinates know less overall, what is the point of using junior personnel at all? The answer lies in Heap’s Law, which predicts a steady stream of new and novel problems that must be researched. In a law firm environment, this accounts for the huge number of legal research memoranda done on a variety of legal issues. Clients often think a professional can know all the law, but this is impossible. As the body of encountered phenomena increases, so do the identifiable types of phenomena. Heap’s law was originally established in linguistics, and the same phenomena seen with law firms apply to linguists as well.
A second crucial issue is quality control, which in the big law firm world is the butt of many jokes that are nevertheless true. Often, we hear about the law associate doing quality control who fixes perhaps 4 typos and a few punctuation marks in a contract. Ordinary laypersons may question the value, but corporations don’t. Well-established legal precedent has found, in many instances, that a single small punctuation mark can determine the outcome of an entire case. In translation, likewise, academic studies have found that only 20% of the time is spent on actually typing out a translation, while 80% is spent on things like research and quality control. Thus, your language services team should look a lot like your in-house legal counsel team—diverse, expert-driven, and coordinated.
