Numerous countries are pursuing contradictory policies of training lawyers and linguists simultaneously in low-quality legal translation. In law schools, legal English and legal translation are taught to students with minimal foreign language training and a lot of legal subject matter training. Translation schools do the opposite, students learn minimal legal subject matter but a great deal of foreign language skills. Neither group is even minimally qualified to translate English documents. Thus, in China it tends to be US juris doctor holders whose educations were financed by wealthy families, who lived abroad for several years, who bridge the gap. The scarcity of such privileged families creates scarcity driving high costs: corporate lawyers like this in Shanghai are charging $1,600/hour.
In Europe, a solution emerged as the Lawyer-Linguist initiative, which is reasonably successful between continental European languages that comprise the EU, but universities are not keeping pace. Legal English and Translation programs should shift to the EU’s Lawyer-Linguist model.
Law schools cannot effectively train lawyers in legal English
The “Legal English” training field is a dinosaur from the age before science came to linguistics, and unqualified teachers could peddle quackery without any scrutiny or professional responsibility. The quackery is deeply entrenched; contrary to the opinion of basically every scientist of linguistics, an industry has emerged in educational systems that attempts to divorce the study of English from the culture of the United States and the United Kingdom. The reasoning around the world is that if 100% of the population has to study English, then this would result in entire populations being indoctrinated into a foreign culture. To solve the problem, education policy developed the notion of teaching English while avoiding touching on the social aspects of English culture. This matured into English for Special Purposes education programs, where only language is taught and background social issues are untouched.
At law schools in China, in practice this means law students will study almost all classes in their native language, then get a “legal English” class involving lots of memorized word lists, in reality often word-for-word translations generated by Google Translate. There is no real contact with English law or lawyers. Most linguistics researchers today agree that language is deeply enmeshed in its social context and cannot be separated for the purpose of language education. When you have someone with a background in law come into a legal English classroom and have people go over law-related word lists and each word’s meaning, social context is being separated from the language.
A science-based approach to legal English education would be content based instruction using genuine materials taught by people from the relevant region. Moreover, this should be done for other languages like Spanish and Russian. In content-based instruction, the focus should be on classes teaching basic concepts like torts or civil procedure; these fields would then be introduced in English in authentic social contexts, albeit with some adjustments made to focus more on the utilization of language skills rather than sitting in a lecture hall like a potted plant. Moreover, students trained in this manner should focus on and specialize in legal linguistics. A high school English education and two college-level courses are not sufficient for a lawyer to learn English well enough to counsel clients, and the resulting language skill is simply sub-proficient.
Why low-quality legal English education is so popular—and outdated
Current translator training approaches was based on conditions in the 1970s, and back then it was fairly appropriate. Language services and professional translation have come a long way since then because the lack of language technology made it necessary to have universal English education. In the 1970s and 1980s, translation was a mere shadow of its current capability. Mailing something to a translator was not instant in those days. There would often be week-long turnarounds on what today might take half a day, and computer-assisted translation simply did not exist. Consider the fact that in 1985, 100% of air conditioner repair technicians in China needed to learn English and get certified; otherwise, they couldn’t read the manuals. Today, these same manuals are in Chinese, owing to the fact that the language services industry is well-developed now compared to 40 years ago. A tiny group of 0.1% of the air conditioning industry can now handle the language needs of the other 99.9%.
Secondly, translator training in the 1980s mostly consisted of students memorizing word lists in books and then organizing memorized word lists into pages of incoherent English. On the other hand, international lawyers actually had access to genuine English learning, albeit fairly informal, by simple virtue of directly interacting with foreign people and having authentic opportunities to learn English. Therefore, in that time period, translators were the least well-trained in language, whereas lawyers and accountants had superior training due to their ability to have direct contact with foreign people.
Today, the situation is a lot different. Language programs have evolved a great deal and there is a much more robust flow of people across borders. Language learning technology has vastly improved, and translators in training have the opportunity to learn genuine English skills. Artificial intelligence support for translators can improve quality a great deal and, if needed, speed it up a great deal too. Thus, it’s no longer necessary to train 100% of the population in English, and 1% can suffice. I believe the time has come to move to a language education policy for language and international lawyers that involves narrowing the number of people receiving intensive education to a small percentage of the population, from 100% down to no more than 1%.
Specialized training is necessary to teach legal English experts
A key factor to be corrected that entrenches the English as lingua franca approach in existence today has a lot to do with how education is structured. Translation education and foreign language programs traditionally focused on literature, diplomacy, and journalism since most translation work focused on these fields prior to globalization, although the share seems to have rapidly shrunk to about 20% today. As the HBR noted, referring to European translators (but the same can be said in Asia as well), language service professionals aren’t being trained and prepared for business purposes. In parallel with this, since the 1990s, a large number of international students in the US and UK have been focusing on economic-related fields like engineering, finance, business, and law.
Even with fairly low general English proficiency and no linguistics training, graduates of these programs are much better prepared to translate for these fields than trained translators — who have zero preparation or education in these fields and often can’t understand what financiers are talking about, even in their native languages.
The LLM educational system provides a reasonably effective model of what this could look like: in a USA LLM program, foreign lawyers attend classes on the various basics of United States law, such as torts, contracts, and so forth. A key reason such high-quality education isn’t used in places like China or Japan is that high-quality teachers for the programs would be too expensive to use for 100% of the population. This is absolutely correct, but 99% of the people who learn ESL will not be using the language professionally, and international-facing workers are a very small percentage of the population.
In my view, there is no fundamental reason that linguists cannot get the same high-quality English language instruction as law and business majors. The main reason for the disparity in educational access over the years seems primarily to have been the stigmatization of translation and foreign language as an unserious, pink-collar profession against the general perception of other fields, like engineering and finance, as serious, powerful, man’s man fields where real sophisticated work is done. Snobbery is not a great basis on which to organize educational policy, however. As it turns out, lawyers with just a few years’ exposure to United States English who spend 50 hours a year on translation work tend to do a very poor and amateurish job of those translations, although over the years it has been better than nothing.
A possible system for implementation
To do a thought experiment, imagine that a legal Spanish educational program involved bringing over several dozen Mexican law professors to teach in Shanghai, where civil law and Latin American business would be learned in Spanish from Mexican teachers. What are the objections to this? Cost? Mexico’s GDP per capita is the same as China’s. Usefulness? The majority of Chinese vehicle business contracts in North America are written in Spanish, English is a bridge between them. Most North American Chinese telecom equipment contracts use Spanish, and English again as a bridge. For languages such as Russian, Arabic, Urdu, and Portuguese, there is also a large amount of direct transactions and countries with similar or lower GDP than China. Moreover, students educated in this manner would be able to work as more than just translators, they would also be qualified paralegals, comparative law scholars, or could work as local in-house legal counsel in places like Mexico City or Moscow.
English is the language where this kind of approach would become more questionable, because the cost of the education would be much higher. However, the cost of using misleading legal translations between Chinese and English is that foreign companies won’t be willing to do business locally because the legal risks are too great. For example, China in 2024 deported a Volkswagen executive because cocaine was in his bloodstream when he arrived at an airport, despite that this kind of Chinese law isn’t followed elsewhere. But China’s English uses the same word “drugs” for two different things (药品、毒品), so in Chinglish there’s no difference between legal and illegal drugs, unlike correct English which calls the legal one “pharmaceuticals.” Thus, it’s not surprising that foreigners in China don’t understand what all this mangled English about drugs is really saying.
Thus, while Chinese news reports keep saying more foreign investment and foreign experts are needed for the economy, foreign companies keep getting hit with legal enforcement actions along the lines of, “Surprise! I bet you didn’t know this was illegal in China did you!?” Thus, focusing on cranking out lots of defective, misleading, or useless English about China is just going to result in shock legal enforcement that encourages capital and talent to look elsewhere—Thailand, Mexico, Korea, India—or any other country where government law enforcement actions don’t look and feel like a game of Russian Roulette. Considering how shock legal enforcement (from the foreign perspective) has reduced FDI inflows by over $100 billion annually (about 30%), a few million dollars to get English right is a drop in the bucket compared to the massive bleeding China’s economy is seeing.
Conclusion: The Future
Nonetheless, international educational systems and institutional setups have not kept pace, which is understandable since the kind of really advanced AI that would make universal English education obsolete has only been around for two or so years. However, in the linguistics field, I believe we all saw this day coming decades ago. Rates for translation since 1980 have fallen by around 90% for achieving basically the same quality across a large number of fields. In this respect, having a small number of highly trained people can get superior results as compared to spreading the same number of resources across a population 100 times the size.
As a result of the “spread thin” approach, the language training provided to translators and linguistics in most countries around the world is absolutely atrocious. Almost all linguists, even those used by elite American federal agencies, have substandard language skills and an inability to avoid miscommunication. To be genuinely effective, translators will need high-quality teachers and high-quality training. Instead, what they often get is a teacher who lacks the ability to carry on a conversation in English about even fairly basic and everyday topics, teaching incorrect or outdated English. Exposure to native speaker teachers, much less properly accredited teachers, or experts in the relevant fields coming from those countries, is extremely limited. By focusing resources currently spread thin across 100% of the population to 1% of the population or less, genuine high-quality language service can be provided in the international legal process.
