In this Part III of the Lawyer Misconception Series, I want to explain how misinformation spread by unethical translation practices results in attorneys facilitating international crime. These are serious crimes: the worst of terrorism, mafia, and Russian oligarch conspiracy for foreign domination have been alleged. I believe that the misconceptions attorneys have about legal translation covered in Part I and Part II are to blame. In this article, I will present proof that numerous big law firms have been deliberately lied to by unethical translation companies, that the same deliberate lies are being parroted (unknowingly) on the Hague Law Blog, that law firms relying on these misrepresentations would further major criminal and terroristic conspiracies, and that resulting mass murder incidents were verified by federal investigators and arrests made.
What are these laws, anyway?
The FCPA, EAR, and AML regimes; these are all federal international law regulations generally designed to prevent international organized crime, terrorism, and clandestine operations. FCPA stands for Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and when Chinese Translation is involved, this involves bribery, such as the allegations of bribery in Latin America for infrastructure projects. EAR is the Export Administration Regulations, governing unlawful exports of things like semiconductors to state sponsors of terror, which lead to Meng Wanzhou’s arrest. AML refers to Anti-Money Laundering, and a big case on this for Chinese translators was the allegation that Chinese banks had wired money to Palestinian terrorists to support terror; a big controversy that later just disappeared.
A law firm’s role in FCPA, EAR, and AML compliance is to ensure ethically that the corporations are following federal law against bribery, sensitive exports, and money laundering; especially where the corporation knows that something horrible will happen as a result, or where they might just be looking the other way. There are very interesting cases where law firm general counsel have been fired for not looking the other way on bribery allegations, and thus many lawyers are indeed pressured to help break the law – which many regulators believe is a widespread problem. From a corporation’s point of view, things like bribery done prior to the FCPA were actually recorded as legitimate business expenses. Thus, as the Harvard Business Review pointed out in its article on ethical business problems, quite a few managers are happy to boost numbers by doing things that are both unlawful and unethical, and translation is a great enabler for those who want to look the other way.
The international law attorneys I know, who work routinely on FCPA, EAR, and AML, uniformly do not want to aid and abet organized crime and terrorism. Nevertheless, translation companies are still able to make them unwitting accomplices. Staffing unqualified translators results in the omission of key facts from English versions. The corporation is happy that no problems were found, at least until regulators make a discovery they charge as criminal, and when they do, they will not even acknowledge that the attorney used (such as in USA v. Huawei).
Attorneys are being lied to
In Part II of this series, I argued disinformation from dishonest translation companies creates a parallel universe of alternate facts regarding translation in which lawyers find themselves. Lawyers rely on the advice of translation companies to help them do a good job. Thus, even if a lawyer does not intend to aid and abet criminal conspiracies or terrorism, unethical translation companies will still steer them in with misinformation. Allegedly, almost every law firm doing FCPA and AML has been victimized in this manner. The issue was first reported almost a decade ago in 2012 on the past ATA President’s blog and has remained controversial to this day.
In 2012, the Words to Deeds blog also reported that the FCPA law firms got together during the big Obama push to hire a translation company, ALTA, to create sham translation tests that couldn’t be passed by folks like Japanese native speakers, but could be passed by English speakers using Google Translate (I tested and verified Words to Deeds’ allegation this at the time for Chinese). Possibly backed by a lot of lobbyist money — ALTA was named to the ILR council, despite these shenanigans — these ALTA-credentialed translators then reviewed FCPA documents for the law firms, being told to go extremely fast or be fired, and told federal regulators nothing or at least very little was wrong. The translation tests were produced using Google Translate and a little revision and weren’t really understandable to native speakers. Nonetheless, folks like Emily the Intern or non-native speakers of English just using Google Translate wouldn’t have been able to tell. Words to Deeds quoted a witness as describing the German test as follows:
“The original German one did not even rise to the quality of Internet translation tools, with words and entire passages missing and incorrect and confusing grammar. It is slowly getting better, but it is still a far cry from good. I know many American colleagues who have passed it but have yet to meet a native who has. So I have taken to cheating a bit – re-translate the article into English. And wouldn’t you know it? I did improve my grades.” I covered an issue related to this in an article on back translation of contracts; just because someone like Emily the Intern can translate the document word-for-word into English, it does not mean that the quality is better or that it can achieve any useful purpose for native speakers of the language.
In 2014, a native speaker of Chinese, Wu Jianqing, sued ALTA, Special Counsel, and several FCPA powerhouse firms such as Willkie, Farr & Gallagher, alleging that the use of the ALTA test constituted discrimination against native Chinese speakers. The first case was dismissed, but Wu kept at it, and in a 2021 academic paper, Wu presented several statements, including one saying “a Japanese native born and raised. Practiced law in Japan for 7 years. The 60 min ALTA was utterly incomprehensible, some wording simply and obviously wrong.” I, too, looked at sample ALTA tests, and, in my opinion, they were nothing more than very lightly edited machine translations.
Above, I mentioned that these dishonest companies were deliberately spreading misinformation; let’s get into some proof that this is deliberate. In Part II of this series, I pointed out how the Hague Law Blog attorney said that sworn (certified) translators do no better than uncertified translators and are not worth the extra cost. And here I have found the ALTA website — the fake machine-translated test people — advocating that exact point:
In ALTA’s statements, they are basically saying that people who can’t pass a test of “minimum competence only” are actually totally fine to use. There is also a lot of misdirection here: they refer to a “number of private agencies” and then say the American Translators Association is the “most prominent of these.” This is misleading because the ATA isn’t an agency; it’s a non-profit association that files taxes saying it does not work as an agency for a third party. The statement then says the majority of ALTA’s translators are certified by one or more of these “agencies,” lumping in the ATA Certification with sham fake private certification programs. In the USA, there’s really only one certified translator program: the ATA. All the others are sham. But this statement makes it seem like most of ALTA’s translators are ATA Certified Translators, when the number of translators registered for ALTA, or any translation intermediary, would make that statistically impossible. The big lie, however, appears on another section of the ALTA website, where ALTA represents to a different set of clients that there is a quality difference according to the certification scale that uses the federal government standards:
“The candidate is able to produce a very high-quality and error-free translation that reads as though it were written in the target language.” https://www.altalang.com/language-testing/alta-scale/
So, if you are a federal government client buying tests, ALTA says there is a quality difference. If you are a law firm representing a client under federal probe, they say the opposite; that there is no relationship between passing these exams and quality. These two things cannot simultaneously be true: one of these clients is being lied to and straight to their face, and you can bet your ass ALTA isn’t lying to the FBI Official about this because they KNOW lying to a federal agent is a criminal offense. On the other hand, lying to gullible big law firms is acceptable.
Almost all of the translation companies that say certification makes no quality difference are also federal or GSA contractors that make exact the opposite representation to the federal government, so basically, 100% of legal translation companies. The federal standards and descriptions state extremely clearly that there is a quality difference and describe the proficiency level for uncertified translators as “The resulting product is a draft translation, subject to quality control.”
Let’s go back to the Hague Law Blog author’s statements that he worked with such translation companies to staff certified translators, and his echoing of the above deliberately false misrepresentations to lawyers. While he’s not working in one of these sensitive fields, he’s working with these same types of companies and repeating the same types of lies. If ALTA knows that this kind of representation is false, then Lukken’s company also knows, or frankly should know, that this kind of representation is false. While they don’t make it as obvious as ALTA does, they work for the same kinds of federal agencies, who have the linguistic expertise to tell these are lies.
The Hague Law Blog called the certified professional linguist associations “guilds”– I would urge them to connect with professional translator associations to see just how false that belief is.
Risks to international law firms
I have found good evidence of lawyers writing about their use of translation, showing that they were hoodwinked. Honestly, I think that the Hague Law Blog’s author, who is head and shoulders above the big law community on using translation, was hoodwinked because I, too, was hoodwinked for a while. The Department of Justice was also deceived by similar companies and wound up bringing criminal prosecution against one in USA v. Anwari.
The Wu lawsuit and other publicly available information quite clearly show that dozens of top international law firms were relying on what were essentially minimally edited machine translations in a way that obviously crippled their ability to do accurate work. If the federal government and dozens of major international law firms could not see through this problem, why should we think that the Hague Law Blog’s intern Emily is capable of accurately assessing this quality? I believe the claims made on the Hague Law Blog are good evidence of how easy it is for dishonest language service providers to misinform lawyers — almost any lawyer, no matter how experienced or smart — and how these lawyers will parrot such misinformation as part of their legal advice to clients.
Allowing an unethical translation company to negligently distort and conceal the true contents of legal documents can have severe consequences. If you want a good example, take a look at the indictment in USA v. Huawei and search for the phrase “Huawei attorneys also reiterated the false claim” and see the serious allegations of fraud that follow. Other juicy sound bites include “HUA WEI USA issued a 23-page “Investigation Report,” authored by its Chief Legal Counsel for Labor and Employment and its Executive […] the report purported to summarize the findings of an “internal investigation” […] The Investigation Report contained several false and misleading statements about the events that had transpired. The report falsely stated […].”
Reading between the lines here, Huawei’s general counsel had a translation company translate e-mails for it, which were inaccurate and resulted in the general counsel unwititngly making false statements. Prosecutors who had FBI linguists, who generally work in-house and generally cannot do sham work, quickly figured out the truth behind the e-mails and made this clear when they said, “In truth and in fact, there were numerous e-mails between HUAWEI CHINA robotics engineers and A.X. and F.W. pertaining to HUAWEI CHINA’ s and HUAWEI USA’ s efforts to steal unauthorized technical information about Tappy.” Prosecutors don’t even mention that HUAWEI CHINA engineers e-mailed each other in Chinese, and that both Huawei USA’s in-house counsel and prosecutors must have therefore been relying on translations. Rather, a misrepresentation by a translator automatically becomes fraud by the attorney.
ATA Certified translators have known about false translation schemes for a decade; the 2012 post on Words to Deeds foreshadowed the Wu lawsuit and the criminal prosecutions by Huawei.
A great case study to shine light on why translator negligence was ignored for so long is former government translator Sibel Edmonds, who said similar fraud by dishonest translators in government was enabling attacks like 9/11. Only after she was fired for calling attention to the issue did the FBI take a look and find that, yes, the linguist team actually did have the capability to stop the 9/11 attack but made a few oversights and mistakes there. The FBI then promised the issue was fixed and won’t happen again. Translators who stick their necks out and say these processes are defective are likely to be fired. When I worked as a lawyer with a translation background, I had the position and ability to stop unethical translation company misconduct. However, no linguist within an organization can stop unethical or unlawful behavior. Not only are linguists usually totally socially isolated from everyone else in the organization, but they will also be terminated for raising such ethical concerns. The law firm itself is handled with what’s called “mushroom management,” where the contact keeps them in the dark and feeds them shit, which is evident in ALTA’s misleading advice about certified translators.
The above cases show a historical trend that should be of great interest to attorneys such as those at the Hague Law Blog, which unintentionally parroted false misinformation spread by dishonest translation companies. For the last 20 years, whistleblowers such as Edmonds and Wu tried and failed to stand up to the damage this kind of misinformation could cause. The federal government is catching up to this problem as well, as demonstrated in USA v. Huawei and USA v. Anwari. Through this article, I hope that private sector law firms will also hear the call and overcome unethical translation company misinformation.
