While essential, Chinese translation is a minefield for all who come near.
Back in my law practice days, I often found myself in a conference room with highly paid New York attorneys reading over, and really struggling to understand the content of their Chinese legal translations. Here we had the most profitable investment banks using the most prestigious lawyers, reading over broken English written less competently than short stories I penned at the age of 7. No matter how much these firms paid for the translations, they always seemed to come out dangerously bad. Lawyers began publicly warning clients of the “disaster” that could strike from using one of these translations. I personally witnessed companies have their core technologies stolen, forced to pay hundreds of millions in damages, and even be threatened by the American federal government with annihilation.
Fast forward today, I am the only translator in the world both certified by the American Translators Association to translate from Chinese to English who is also licensed to practice law, and I now teach and research at Shanghai International Studies University as a professor of legal translation. I also serve as a translation expert to the People’s Congress of China, the nation’s highest legislative body, in producing translations of the most important laws. In that period of time, I saw Chinese translation used in the business and legal contexts from a variety of perspectives. In the large law firm environment, I saw attorneys at the associate level and partner level alike displaying great anger at their extremely low-quality translations or being totally complacent in the face of grossly misleading translations. They did not know how badly they were being misled, but simply thought the grammar was merely a bit awkward.
On the management side of a large (top 3) translation company working on Chinese projects, I saw just how irrelevant even large corporate and legal clients were to project managers and translators, and how quickly and routinely a translation project would devolve into outright fraud. I also observed the structural deficiencies in the translation industry that actively obstruct Chinese translation best practices from being followed, often resulting in disasters for clients. From the humorous claim in trade secrets litigation that a Chinese technology company has invented time travel, to the serious matter of a mistranlated document falsely alerting the SEC a company is routinely engaged in serious fraud, the world of corporate Chinese translation is as as bizarre and outrageous as the signs directing tourists to carefully walk off a cliff.
What could be driving this madness? On the English-speaking side, I found a sense of helplessness or complacency pervades. Make no mistake—China and Chinese pose the greatest cultural and linguistic challenge for businesses from Europe and America. Every day, consumers of Chinese translation approach the field like tourists in a Las Vegas casino, ready to have their pockets cleaned out and to receive nothing of value in return. Enough is enough. With the blog series of useful articles on how to be a sophisticated consumer of Chinese translation, I believe that you as a potential future consumer of Chinese translation need not be like the Las Vegas tourist going up against stacked odds in a casino. Instead, you’ll be more like the movie character Obi-wan Kenobi weaving through a “hive of scum and villainy” to find a true ally in Han Solo.
To find answers and solutions to these problems, I have travelled to China and worked a Chinese translator focused on business law, ultimately supervising the work of over one hundred different translators, and in being a professor of Chinese Business Law Translation at Shanghai International Studies University, China’s oldest and most prestigious translation institute. Here, I have learned more about individual Chinese translators, their capabilities, and behavior.
Over the next few months I will be sharing a series of articles aimed at helping businesses understand the many problems and risks involved posed by being a consumer of Chinese translation, and on providing readers with useful information about how to vet and purchase Chinese translations used for their business. In addition to covering the basics, I will cover many of the serious problems that are encountered in this field. My hope is that by the end of the reading these blog posts, the English-speaking buyer will no longer have the odds stacked against them when working in the challenging Chinese environment.
1 comment
Look forward to mroe