When I ask Chinese-English translators what kind of sources they use to learn English for legal contexts, I am typically told that they use English textbooks and manuals written by native Chinese speakers at universities in China, with parallel Mandarin and English texts. When looking at the work of these translators, I discover that, for the most part, they are producing nonsense translations that no native speaker could accurately understand. And while usually grammatically correct, the translations usually mean something totally different from the source document. A legal translator using this sort of reference material is making a huge mistake, which could ultimately cause clients extremely severe financial damage.
Chinese Authorities on English
Here is an example of a “legal English book” by a respected Chinese author:
A highly common-sense argument against using these books is that a Chinese author who has spent their entire life in China, should not be considered an authority on English. There are plenty of legal English experts outside China, and plenty of authentic materials to use, without needing to learn from someone whose native language is not English. Nonetheless, the majority of Chinese legal translators, when left to their own devices, will go straight to these kinds of books as a resource for learning English. I believe the reason is that such books use a pseudoscientific learning methodology for the foreign language that greatly reduces the challenge and mental strain the learner would have to experience when using one of these books. The method is a translation-based approach to learning English, where parallel texts are presented to the legal translator which the translator then memorizes or at least studies as an equivalent. This method is still used in China’s high schools, but college programs have already begun abandoning it.
There is a good reason to avoid learning foreign languages using a translation-based approach and, in fact, I would avoid using bilingual references altogether when doing a translation. In the language learning sciences, experts have long agreed that exposure to authentic, highly genuine native-language materials and learning the precise meaning of words and language structure from the social context gets the best results. The Middlebury Institute and Princeton University famously advocate this practice, and even have students in their immersion programs take a language pledge to forego all English usage and use only the foreign language! Nonetheless, these books remain highly popular among Chinese legal translators for providing easy answers.
When reviewing any translation work produced using legal English learned through these kinds of non-native learner resources, I generally cannot understand what the English is saying. Typically, I will need the origin Chinese copy to understand what they are “really” trying to say; for this reason, I generally advise companies in China against requesting “polishing” of any kind of legal or corporate documents. Simply put, if I can’t see the original Chinese, I can’t understand what the document is saying. This phenomenon can explain most criminal charges and sanctions against Chinese companies today.
What Legal English Resources Work?
I can share a story about a native Chinese speaker who mastered legal English and now makes about half a million dollars a year. This was one of my classmates at the University of Texas School of Law, who had great LSAT scores but, by his own account, could hardly speak English or understand anything in law school. I had observed him initially using Chinese legal English books before arriving, and unsurprisingly these were of no help for law school. When he did arrive in the United States, he switched to a high-efficacy legal English learning approach involving listening to law lectures for 3 hours a day and reading American law books about United States law for about 12 hours a day. He learned enough to get decent grades in his first semester after about fourteen weeks, and by his second semester he was at the top of the class, and prime pick for top law firms. He went on to be a very successful transactional lawyer. This story, which repeats itself in law schools all across America, is incredibly common and probably typical for PRC students studying at US JD programs.
When reviewing English-language contracts written by lawyers in China at international departments of big Chinese companies, I have also noticed that they are capable of writing these contracts in mostly totally perfect English, with perhaps four or five English-language meltdowns in a 30-page contract. And these meltdowns are easy fixes. Translators for the same corporation churn out translated contracts in totally incomprehensible English where the terminology and sentence structure basically share nothing in common with the English spoken in any country, whether it be America or the Philippines. Nobody can understand this stuff and it’s causing huge legal disasters every year. Law blogs even warn against relying on those translations. So, what’s the difference?
Legal translators with a Master’s in Translation and Interpretation are relying on a different source of English learning than their JD counterparts, and thus the Chinese juris doctor holders learned a great deal of authentic legal English from authentic sources, and also a great deal about the culture of the legal profession. Translators, on the other hand, are having everything they learn about English used in the legal context mediated, filtered, and re-presented in bilingual format by someone in China. They learn little more than to make word and phrase associations between Chinese and English, and the English they produce is a wholly artificial language constructed on the backbone of Chinese. Much more alarming to legal translators should be the fact that very few of these JDs studied any kind of foreign language-related material. They are typically law, economics, finance, or engineering majors from China who attend juris doctor programs in the US, also learning law. Legal translators spend 6.5 years in language-focused programs and get worse results than people who focused purely on a technical profession.
With that said, let’s look at case studies that present evidence that these highly respected legal English authorities are actually causing disastrous results when applied to translation.
Evidence of Problems
A particularly salient list of evidence regarding the efficacy of these kinds of books on translation is the number of rejections of what appears to be perfectly good Hague Convention on Service of Process petitions to the PRC Ministry of Justice, in addition to the very small number of American cases that have been granted enforcement in China. To date, only three cases have been enforced. I’ve taken a look at translations of documents related to these petitions, and they are almost all word-for-word translations using bilingual references and dictionaries which, when put together, do not make a lot of sense. For example, an employee policy restricting intellectual property theft often makes little sense to readers, but it’s hard to explain why. In the same policies, however, you can find good examples where the policy prohibits the consumption of alcohol on-premises, referring to alcoholic beverages, but the Chinese word used is “ethanol,” a chemical compound and a word typically used in medical contexts. Chinese does in fact have a word for “alcohol” that refers specifically to alcoholic beverages, and local employment policies use that word.
In the Chinese to English side, we can also find some statistical evidence from the internet that very few readers can even understand translations produced with this kind of guidance. You can test this for yourself: there are two websites that translate a lot of Chinese law into English but they do so differently. One is Chinalawinfo.com, which uses the approach form the mainstream PRC Legal English books by a team of professional translators, whereas Chinalawtranslate.com is produced by crowd sourcing from novices looking to get some practice but using a more American academic approach advocated by Jeremy Daum. Whose translations get more views outside China? The winner is the novices of Chinalawtranslate. Chinalawinfo gets almost no English-speaking visitors, and I think the reason behind this is that the translations make no sense. Virtually the entire Chinalawinfo market consists of Chinese organizations using it as a translation reference, or overseas Chinese. If you have thousands of pages of translation that nobody is actually using as a reader, that’s probably a good sign that the translation isn’t comprehensible to them.
There is also good evidence from the courts; the Supreme Court case Animal Sciences v. Hebei Welcome Pharmaceuticals regarding exceptions to anti-trust legislation shows that these resources are getting very poor results. The relevant translation-related facts in Animal Sciences was that a certain Chinese regulation would excuse Welcome from anti-trust liability, according to the interpretation of the PRC Ministry of Justice. The trial court disregarded the PRC interpretation and interpreted the regulation about a “verify and chop” process using American English, which means something very different from the Chinglish and meant to “provide approval under official seal” in American English and the PRC’s exhortations. The Court of Appeals overturned the $400 million verdict and held that the PRC MOJ interpretation must be given deference, and the Supreme Court overruled and reinstated the trial court’s judgment. A particularly key fact was that the PRC appeared to be saying different things at different times, advocating opposite positions inconsistently. The PRC wasn’t actually flip-flopping, but the translations were highly inconsistent and, in particular, highly colloquial Chinese was interpreted to English meaning something totally different than the highly formal written Chinese statements.
These kinds of books are considered highly authoritative in China and are generally used and followed. However, if they were providing effective English instruction, cases similar to the above would not occur as the result of the translations.
Conclusion
The above situation creates something of a paradox: by focusing more on learning English, the would-be translators are actually learning less than the people sharply focused on professional learnings, since it leads them to use inauthentic materials as an illusory shortcut. The results of these translations can be so dangerous that they have repeatedly caused catastrophes for clients. This situation has led many attorneys to declare translators a useless profession, but, as I argued in a previous article, having lawyers with no translation training or even focus translate documents also causes serious problems.
