Law firms that do not take adequate care may be sabotaged by Mandarin translators in litigation and regulatory cases. In one of my more interesting translation jobs many years ago, I worked for the chief compliance and investigations officer of a Fortune 500 company and was embedded with an off-site translation team responsible for producing potentially damaging documents. During my time with the team, not a day went by without something that could falsely incriminate the company for terrible malfeasance being written into the translations. In a particularly memorable moment, while translating documents marked to be produced to securities regulators, the lead translator of a very large translation company wrote that the company “defrauded” others when the document really meant that the company simply “cashed out” assets. The legal team had effectively hired Mandarin translators to sabotage them.
Translator Anonymity is Russian Roulette
A root cause of the sabotage was that neither the corporate client nor the law firm knew who the translators were—the translation company had a policy of anonymity, refusing to disclose the translators’ identities. There was no communication at all with the translators about why the client had ordered the services or what the translation was for. You would think this is extremely unusual for any professional services matter; most firms make it clear who is doing the work and partner with their clients. This company was also quite indifferent to the client’s needs or quality of service. If any translators expressed concerned about the quality of the work, the translation company would simply respond that “it’s totally normal,” and they were told not to worry about it. For the law firm and Fortune 500 company however, the translation quality was an extremely serious issue.
On-site, a number of the translators working on the project actually thought that they were working for the regulator and that their job was to prove fraud on the big, evil corporation. Others thought that we were brought in as fully independent auditors and if they had to decide on a bet-the-company issue, even something that could potentially trigger a costly and unnecessary SEC probe or result in fines, then they should probably flip a coin on it—because it would only be “fair” to split the risk of a false guilty and false innocent interpretation 50/50. In other cases, the translators sent documents to contacts at competitors in the client’s industry to ask for their help in interpreting them, and naturally, those competitors used such documents to harm the client.
In contract to the anonymity of English-speaking translation companies, many Mandarin specialized translation companies will introduce their translators to the client, which is the exact opposite of the anonymity rule .
Know Your Translator
The American company and its law firm had ignored a basic aspect of Chinese business practices called “guanxi。”Guanxi, a very common word in Mandarin, which basically means relationships. Without a relationship, the law firm is totally in the dark about how those translators will treat their client. In the banking world, banks are required to “Know Your Customer” to prevent criminal behavior. In the China practice field, renown anthropologist Fei Xiaotong wrote a lengthy study that went as far as to worryingly suggest moral behavior does not exist in the absence of guanxi relationships. Attorneys who follow a principle of “Know Your Translator” can avoid problems that occur because no relationship is in place. Likewise, the attorneys in the above story could have built a relationship with their translation team.
Instead, the translation company shrouded the translation team in a thick cloak of anonymity in an effort to prevent clients from directly soliciting translators. The translation turned a provider-client relationship into a supply chain relationship. Thus, the translation company model of managing translators by insulating them from clients and ensuring that the client remains a “stranger” in all respects, prevented those translators from being motivated to help the client. In many law firm translation cases, the translators don’t even know if there even is a client. I would argue that much of the “unfair” treatment Western firms face in China can be traced to problems that appear in the translation supply chain. Of course, Western companies are sabotaged because a small but significant of translators are hostile towards them—which is another reason why it is important to know your translator.
Hostility to the West
If you’ve been following China closely, you may already be aware of the many prominent thinkers who propose weaponizing many perfectly benign institutions in order to achieve a hostile purpose. A law professor’s study, Lawfare: Law as a Weapon of War, argues many states, including China have pursued a strategy of weaponizing legal institutions as a weapon of war to achieve objectives more traditionally pursued through military action. In my personal experience, a number of Mandarin translators have suggested something similar using translation—that it, coupled with a mastery of a foreign language, could be deployed as a weapon against western civilization. The law, translation, and even English education are each being manipulated for nationalistic purposes, and any law firm blissfully unaware of this reality faces potential disaster. This should be gravely concerning to any attorney working on a matter involving Mandarin.
The concept that both law and translation can be weaponized opens the door for the legal translation process to be manipulated. This is what I have seen time and again: legal matters involving Mandarin translators where subtle acts of sabotage were effectuated against the company, in addition to the routine and large-scale theft of Western corporations’ confidential information by said translators, especially through use of machine translation. Even heads of state have remarkably found high-level documents faked, simply dumped entirely into machine translation software. A lawyer cannot simply assume that those anonymous translators working on your project are friendly towards your country; they may, in fact, be hostile. The flip side of the coin is that they may be unwilling to reveal compromising information about companies on their side of the perceived national power struggle, instead using translations to cover up .
In my own experience as a translation teacher reviewing essays for would-be Mandarin translators, I have found that a surprising number of the essays express antipathy, resentment, or outright hostility to western culture, particularly the United States and Great Britain. I would have expected foreign language majors to have a strong interest in their subject’s culture, yet most budding Mandarin translators expressed no interest in Western culture whatsoever in their statements. Instead, such applicants would write about why they think their own culture and society is superior or more important and view translation as a tool to introduce the “China story” to the world. Such essays generally reflect an attitude that English is an instrument of soft power used to promote nationalist ascendancy.
In their essays, a sizable minority of the students actively exhibited hatred or anger towards Western culture and described the English language as a “weapon” to be used against foreigners on the world stage. Some years ago, I read one particularly remarkable essay introducing the concept of weaponized translation using an example from a foreign ministry spokesman’s foreign press conference. The translator writing the essay stated that a journalist had asked a “rude” question of the minister, which I understood to mean politically incorrect, and the official “righteously” struck back at the foreign journalist using English. This proved that translation of Mandarin into a foreign language could be an effective weapon to defend China’s national interests against foreigners and to some extent, be used to engage in a war of words against foreign peoples.
These apparently strange attitudes did not arise by accident but were a deliberate product of these students’ education. In China, educators have long advocated turning English-language study into a “patriotic enterprise” and use foreign language texts to inculcate a patriotic devotion to the state. Major newspapers have even reported on such nationalists going as far as expressing their love of country through violent outbursts against foreign companies. When you are dealing with Mandarin translation, nationalistic education means that many translators signing up to work for you are hostile to Western company.
The only way to avoid these problems is by having your translation projects supervised by truly trustworthy and competent professional translators who put professionalism first. Highly qualified professional translators are bound by strict rules of professional conduct and are committed to their clients’ success. Law firms generally lack the capability to effectively supervise translators because it is not an area of their core competence. Thus, they turn to outsourcers in the hope that they will supervise translators for them, but often fail to recognize that the outsourcers generally do not provide supervision in-house, but rather outsource projects by e-mail. Thus, the translators receive extremely poor guidance and supervision, and in the absence of any authority or guanxi, act unprofessionally. After all, there is no one on hand to stop them.
A sophisticated person would turn to a professional translator with strong credentials to supervise translation tasks, especially for large e-discovery projects. Many lawyers are under the impression that they can simply farm out translation projects to staffing firms and, without ever talking to a real translator, have correct work sent back to them. This is gravely mistaken, for the same reason you can’t send a case to a contract attorney and expect to receive a favorable settlement to a business dispute in the mail.
Conclusion
Client sabotage in Mandarin to English translation projects is commonly encountered. The anonymizing process used by translation companies leads to inappropriate behavior by the translators, who will deliberately act contrary to the interests of an anonymous and unknown client. Moreover, many translators are actually hostile toward Western companies. Translation companies are often aware of this situation and tolerate it because clients do not complain. There is, however, an easy solution. First, as obvious as it sounds, make sure you know who is responsible for translating your Mandarin language legal documents. Spend five minutes looking at their resume; if they spend fifty hours working on your project, then that’s a fantastic investment of time. Don’t rely on anyone outside your firm to review those credentials, because you don’t know what incentives outside parties are working under. Second, make sure you are working with a qualified translator, one at the very least certified by the American Translators Association for Mandarin to English and answerable to the rules of professional conduct, is responsible for your translation.
