According to the Translators Association of China, sham and misleading translations continue to plague the Chinese legal translation industry due to predatory competitive practices. On an individual level, if you have ever taken a casual stroll through a Chinese mall or browsed a Chinese company website, you will likely have quickly noticed the prevalence of “Chinglish” translations. In this article, I take stock of the unique regulatory environment in China brought about as a result of the country’s socio-economic circumstances and propose a simple intervention that can reliably wipe out much of the Chinglish we see today. The intervention itself is fairly simple: use minimum wage principles to force relabeling sham translations as machine translation post-editing services, and not human translations.
Unique China Circumstances
China’s regulatory and economic environment has for many been highly unsuitable for occupational regulatory methods used elsewhere. For reference, occupational practice in the United States and the United Kingdom is comparatively heavily regulated by occupational boards, and there has recently been a great deal of public pressure to tighten regulation for occupations such as doctors and lawyers. Scholars in China have found that, compared to those in the United States, occupational boards in China are highly reluctant to take action, and I recall mentions of the likelihood being more than 99% lower. Reading the academic literature, I don’t see any very firm conclusions as to why. However, based on a lot of anecdotal evidence and stories, it seems that occupations in China have been developing and changing very rapidly since the 1980s and that the relatively stable social expectations about what people in certain occupations should do or “the way things work” seen in the United States haven’t really been applied in China due to differences in social dynamics.
For the story of the legal profession in China, law professors have pointed out that even in fantastically egregious cases, the occupational board will not take action. These cases include lawyers using nefarious, deceptive, and fraudulent methods to harm their own clients. However, minimum pricing rules are something the legal profession in China does apply, and it gets a lot of traction. The rationale goes something like this—in order to obtain clients, nefarious lawyers will try to offer extremely low rates, and then cheat their clients to make up the difference. With minimum pricing, honest lawyers have a chance to compete based on integrity and quality and, when offered both options, clients tend to go with the honest and high-quality representation.
To put the economics under a microscope for service professions, consider the following A vs. B scenarios where the difference in variables is minimum pricing. In the case of fraud-based price competition, the ongoing rock-bottom rates only serve to ensure that only those using deceptive trade practices to lower prices remain active in the market. Thus, clients never encounter anyone other than fraudsters and begin concluding that success is basically out of reach. However, when minimum pricing is introduced into these professions as a type of minimum wage protection, honest providers get added to the relationship and start pointing out cases of fraud and deception to their clients. A common way this happens in translation is when a corporation has a third-party translation consulting service review a translation for quality, and a translator familiar with the patterns of obscure machine translation, AI engines, and paraphrasing tools would then be able to clearly trace non-human work in a so-called “human translation” product.
A Simple Rule
I recommend a simple rule be adopted in the Chinese>English translation market to prevent rampant fraud: establish minimum prices paid to translators working on a fixed rate for human translation projects. Machine translation post-editing (MTPE) services would remain unaffected. The fundamental theory is that human translation requires a certain time investment that cannot be accelerated, and using excessively low prices violates minimum wage principles applicable everywhere else. A purchaser violating these rules would be required by the labor ministry to pay translators the fair difference on rates that were too low during the relationship. The result would look similar to minimum-wage-based translations used for services like Polish<>Russian translations, which are around 1/6th of the United Nations official rate for translators. For those wondering how much Chinese to English translations cost, typical translators in China are currently working for 1/50th of the UN’s rate—pretending to do translation but instead producing elaborately faked work.
I recommend using a deregulated MTPE option to bring the domestic translation market back on track to avoid destructive interference. From the perspective of regulators in China, not unlike those in the United States, there is a great reluctance to interfere destructively in market activities. Thus, from the perspective of Murphy’s Law, the safest option is to allow translators to keep working at existing prices and speeds if needed, with the only difference being that their work cannot be labeled “human translation” and instead must be labeled MTPE in order to qualify for price deregulation. Regulators have refrained from imposing much, if any, regulation on translation otherwise, because dictating how work is done can actually reduce quality and raise costs, thus harming the economy. That probably explains why regulators are not mandating that translation be done in a specific way, even if the quality results are egregious and Chinese scholars allege loss of life resulting from current legal translation practices.
Historical Perspective
From a historical perspective, it’s crucial to observe that this suggestion will only function as of about 2018 when sham translation techniques evolved with the prevalence of machine translation. Prior to 2018, the typical sham translation technique was to hire high school students for around $0.50 an hour to use internet dictionaries to translate content. Many older sham translators still use the technique. This is basically how Chinglish signs came to dominate China—a modest profit could be made on tight deadlines by having rooms of high school students look up dictionary entries, despite none of these English expressions meaning anything useful. Nevertheless, China spent around two billion dollars just translating this content, and several billion dollars more on printing costs. The purpose of a lot of these things was to improve tourists’ stays or attract foreign investment, with the potential payoff from $10 billion invested in foreign language outreach being a possible $100 billion in earnings during the 1980s-2000s. That was a lot of money for a Chinese worker back in the 1980s when people were earning just $1,000 a year.
Technology changes the dynamic a lot, as machine translation quality is now higher than a typical high school student’s. Translators, therefore, may be punished for hiring high school students but given a good review if they use DeepL, simply because current machine translation has a lower risk of outraging foreign readers. Today, it’s relatively easy to demonstrate that a translation is a sham, but even as recently as a decade ago there was no persuasive way to demonstrate a translation was incorrect. Proving a human translation incorrect today in China is also easier than in the past; in the play Chinglish, the protagonist travels to China and, as an expert native English speaker, says that the Chinglish signs make no sense. He is then dismissed by bureaucrats confident in their translators. Today, the internet can be used to easily show that nobody out there is using the nonsense expressions seen on signs, which now makes it much more difficult for scammers to hire high school students to do translations. While the prevalence of Chinglish signage in China has fallen significantly in the past few years, scam translations into English remain common because current unrealistically low prices continue to filter out legitimate translators. Minimum translation pricing based on minimum wage principles is, therefore, an effective intervention that can cure the market dysfunction.
