Neuroscience is extremely important in the study of translation, as language is essentially a product of the mind and something that brain science has correlated with brain activity. Thus, like any good translator, I periodically read neuroscience textbooks that talk about the various findings of neuroscience and neurolinguistics. Quite strikingly, there is often a section about consciousness at the end of these books, and the books admit that modern science basically knows nothing about the nature of the relationship between human consciousness and the brain. That is an informative claim for translation because the nature of language is to describe a subjective conscious experience and symbolize it so that others can subjectively interpret it. A translator’s job is to translate these symbols between different languages based on their subjective meanings, yet scientists can establish little about consciousness. Thus, they turn to Thomas Nagel’s famous paper, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Consciousness
Nagel’s article falls squarely within the philosophy of mind category and, as with the philosophy of language, translators must grapple with many questions not addressed by science. In What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Nagel states that ”an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.” The paper set off quite a bit of interesting debate among neuroscientists and philosophers. For instance, Dennett argued that the theoretically important features of an animal’s consciousness will be possible to observe with sufficient advancements in techniques. Some other neuroscientists have also pointed out that brain activity is observable, and that knowledge about animals’ mental states can be correlated with their behaviors. These arguments, however, do not directly conflict with Nagel’s core assertion that consciousness is a matter of likeness, and that likeness is essential and can be known.
Relevant to translators, language expressions convey things that a person is conscious of and, for legal translation, this can involve highly intangible things such as their intentions, feelings, and social relationships. Semiotics argues there is a chain linking language to subjective consciousness; to fully grasp what someone really means by a language expression you need to know “what it’s like” to be conscious the of thing expressed. As the difference between us and the other person (or animal) being considered increases, our ability to know what it is like also decreases.
Nagel chose bats because, among animals, bats have some of the biggest differences compared to humans. Animals like dogs or monkeys are a lot more similar to us. For example, “What is it like to see as a dog” is a lot easier for us to imagine than what it is like to echolocate as a bat or use infrared sensing as a snake. Similarly, there can also be large differences among human populations, such as genders, disabilities, and cultures. Among cultures, the British Isles are about the furthest one can go both geographically and culturally from China and Japan.
The huge geographical and cultural divides between China and England create some unusual translation problems. For example, “What is it like to not have mianzi?” is a common challenge faced when understanding China, and “What is it like to be technically correct but still wrong?” is a difficult point when understanding English technology articles. For this sort of reason, many of the top-selling literary translators will interview people from the source text’s cultural background to get an idea of what it is like to have the experiences described in the text. Not only does this result in a more accurate rendition of what the text is saying, but doing so for the purpose of a literary translation leads to an overall more coherent and believable text. Nevertheless, many low-quality translations of literary texts, or more commonly subtitles, still lack logic and coherence.
Many readers of those texts often say that, given the poor quality, foreign novels are simply inferior to Chinese art. Another example is the Chinese release of the movie Dune, which was met with widespread criticism for having a poor script. Despite not even evaluating the English version, critics in China simply assumed that the script itself was the reason for the poor experience. Due to the invisibility of the translator’s hand in the work, readers and watchers often only discover that the poor experience is due to translation much later on.
Translating Corporate Texts
When it comes to translating technical and legal text, the same question about “what is it like” is also essential, though the nature of the experience will be much different than that in literary translation. For example, if you are translating for a chemist, then having firsthand experience with organic chemistry experimentation is actually very helpful. I recall reading a post on Quora in which a translator shared that she translated for her company’s engineers without ever really knowing what a “microservice” or a “stack” really is. This is a great anti-pattern for poor translation ability: can you imagine even a humble customer service representative not knowing what their company’s products actually do? Nonetheless, translators instinctively prize their own ignorance as a seemingly normal feature of the job. To remedy the situation, companies now often hire translators directly and put them through customer service training for their products.
The same can generally be said of legal translations. However, no law firm actually trains its translators on the law. More typically, what you’ll see is lawyers deciding to take on the translation work themselves, often full-time. For translators who are working with legal documents, having substantial formal and self-directed law training is a necessity. Without this, the legal texts that the translator produces will lack coherence, having logical problems so severe that no human lawyer could ever possibly produce such a text. A good example of this is a lease agreement that specifies a tenant’s right to “decorate the premises using jackhammers.” This kind of provision lacks logical coherence (i.e. ontological coherence) because nobody “decorates” with a jackhammer. In real estate, this would be called a “build-out.”
The SEC EDGAR database is full of real estate contracts saying that there are houses located on the 20th floor of commercial buildings. While it’s true that several shopping centers go up 20 floors and have a faux grassy lawn and outdoor areas with lots of cute tiny houses where vendors sell things—like how Starbucks has indoor stores styled as full-sized, roofed cabins—these companies are not leasing tiny houses on the 20th floor of office buildings for their accountants to work out of. The reason for the multitude of “tiny-house” contracts in the SEC database uploaded by Chinese companies is mainly due to translators not knowing what a “house” really is. Instead, they saw the word for “premises” and, lacking experiential understanding of either word, illegally uploaded numerous false contracts to the SEC database.
Overcoming Consciousness Barriers
When translating corporate documents, which today span legal, finance, and technical fields, a translator can overcome barriers either through direct education or through the shared consciousness method. In practice, both are typically necessary as direct education will teach a translator about 80% of the relevant concepts in an industry or field. This method differs significantly between STEM and legal fields because of how vocabulary is used in each field. The STEM fields combined use literally millions of different terminology items, but they are mostly standardized across languages in 1-to-1 relationships. Moreover, terminology evolves extremely quickly in key areas like semiconductors and telecommunications due to the rapid pace of new inventions and discoveries.
Legal terminology is basically the opposite. Legal terms are not in standardized 1-to-1 relationships. Worse yet, not only are legal terms not internationally standardized, but they are also not standardized within a single language. I recall one case where I had a dispute over the meaning of the words “subject to” in finance law, and leading law professors would charge over $50,000 to serve as expert witnesses about the meaning of a term that appears in literally billions of different legal documents in America. In defamation law, different jurisdictions have varying definitions of “publication,” and some consider simple acts like whispering a secret to a single other person as “publication.” In another example, judges use a complex multi-factor test to determine whether a loud noise in a neighborhood constitutes a “nuisance.”
The difficulty of legal terminology is so great that PRC government translators simply decided to invent an entire unique set of English vocabulary to create 1-to-1 relationships between Chinese PRC terms and English terms rather than spend dozens of hours on each word trying to figure out what it really means. Even more fascinating is that the PRC has adopted foreign legal concepts, picked a Chinese name that “makes sense” for each concept, and then invented English equivalents for the original Chinese terms. For example, the well-known concept of “alternative dispute resolution” became “diversified dispute resolution.” (story from Li Changshuan)
On the positive side, legal terms only change every century or so, like how “master and servant” slowly evolved to “labor law” and then “employer and employee” over the course of a century. Thus, the legal and technology industries’ relevant professionals look a lot different when viewed from the perspective of consciousness. The employment law expert will tend to be someone with 30 years of experience in the field, working with associates who will be just beginning to get comfortable with the fundamentals of the field by their fifth year. A computer engineer with a master’s degree, on the other hand, will note that the half-life cycle for knowledge learned since obtaining their master’s degree will have occurred about twice—meaning that 75% of what they learned studying for their master’s is already outdated. In the IT field, there is a well-known rumor that many companies don’t want to hire employees over 30 or 35. In contrast, many law firms are reluctant to hire any lawyers under 30. Thus, in self-directed learning, patent translators will need to keep abreast of new trends, while legal translators will need to drill deep into established concepts.
Shared Consciousness
A second useful technique was originally invented by General Stanley McChrystal, now a leadership and management guru famous for his book Team of Teams. The notion of shared consciousness, along with other McChrystal concepts, is now widely adopted for military leadership and is based on the idea that telecommunications technology allows such rapid communication that teams can now achieve shared consciousness, albeit among people with identical training and experience types. Recall above that Nagel described barriers between consciousnesses in the neuroscience debate; McChrystal speaks of developing techniques to break down those consciousness barriers in order to achieve results. While the purposes of their conclusions are different, they involve the same basic idea—being able to relate to and understand a very different conscious experience from oneself.
For translators, this implies working with subject matter experts within the relevant field, especially those with experience solving relevant problems. There is currently a debate in the patent and legal fields about whether a bilingual subject matter expert or a well-trained translator is the superior candidate for doing a translation in the field. The debate itself is a false dichotomy, but in the context of the shared consciousness approach, reveals that the experience of both subject matter experts and linguists is relevant—not only in the European Union sense of lawyer-linguists. Teams that have diverse ranges of experience can leverage effective communication to break down those consciousness barriers. For example, a legal translator and a lawyer very focused on that particular field of law can pool their knowledge together to arrive at superior conclusions.
