The default translation approach used for government guidance documents hosted by CBL is User Centered Translation, and is also recommended for legal advice and memoranda. User-centered translation emphasizes the needs, preferences, and context of the end user who will be reading the translated content. In the context of regulatory guidance and legal explainers provided by CBL, the main focus of User Centered Translation is to achieve usability, contextual relevance, cultural sensitivity, and is achieved by performing audience analysis. Each will be discussed below to explain how these guidance documents are produced in the framework of this translation approach.
Below, a 10-minute explanation of the User Centered Translation approach in the context of legal guidance and advice is provided.
Contents
Maximizing comprehension without loss of meaning
Usability
Usability ensures that content is clear and accessible, enhancing user comprehension and successful communication. It involves simplifying language, maintaining consistency, and adapting content to use cases, making it more efficient for the target audience. The quality achieved by these efforts is measured as ability to achieve user goals and absence of problems, thus strategies like user testing, plain language, and digital content help overcome these obstacles.
Translations of Chinese legal advice and regulator guidance into English is typically completely unusable because it uses the traditional Xin Da Ya approach developed in collaboration with the Jesuit mission in China. Regulatory guidance paragraphs are often written with the beautiful style of ancient Tang Dynasty poems, including a great deal of repetition, parallelism, and functional word nouns. The famous Ming Dynasty official Su Dongpo was also a famous poet. Mao Zedong was a famous poet and giver of laws. About 20%-30% of the word count of a regulatory guidance will be rhetorical flourish. The massive amount of functional word padding can result in documents that are impossible to understand or seem to say nothing.
In a regulatory guidance translation provided by CBL, the UCT method will involve techniques such as consolidating poetic adjectives. For example, a single sentence describing the regulatory environment may repeat the same word with five synonyms repeatedly. An untrained reader (i.e., not Chinese), will usually not be able to comprehend those sentences in user testing. Those five synonyms can be replaced with a single adjective at the front of the sentence, thus enabling the reader to use it for business purposes. From a science-based view, the document is actually more accurate as to law and policy matters after such changes, and can be proven using cognitive debriefing.
Contextual Relevance
Contextual relevance involves aligning the translation with the cultural norms, situational context, and expectations of the target audience to ensure that it is useful and comprehensible. This requires adapting tone, style, and content to fit the specific environment and purpose to better inform and advise. Translators must balance source word correspondence with cultural adaptation, making informed decisions to maintain the translation’s effectiveness and appropriateness.
Translated documents are not being launched into space to exist in a vacuum, rather academic linguists have established that they are part of a web of social contexts. In the law, reading a legal text affects what it means, thus a federal statute is uncertain until a judge interprets it.
The Supreme Court in the Animal Sciences precedent ruled that the translation of a Chinese statute can decide its meaning in US courts, even over the objections of Chinese lawmakers.
When working with a regulatory guidance, jargon used by academic sinologists is often used to translate the text. The jargon actually comprises a separate language called Chinglish or China English; originally, it was generated using statistical machine translations in order to provide a 1-to-1 correspondence with the original document. Therefore, a sinologist need not learn Chinese to do academic commentary, they need only comment on the machine translations and have a mutual consensus about what those texts mean.
A typical global business is however not staffed entirely by sinologists, moreover, even if they all arrive at a consensus about what Chinese law provides, they can still face liability in China for making the wrong decisions. Thus, in CBL’s translations, instead of using the made up pseudo-language, real English words are used that mean the same things. For example in American English, CBL uses the word “corporation” instead of “company limited,” even though China does not use S-Corps and C-Corps and there are some different shareholder rules. Additionally, the poetry or pomp and circumstance around those translations will be condensed.
Well-trained Chinese native speakers initially think this may be inaccurate, because the “Chinese Flavor”, poetry, and history of the document is lost. In their context, having studied these English words and manners of expression in China for a decade, such an expression is their “truth” as English goes. Moreover, sinologists and political scientists may be very interested in using translations that exoticize Asia with strange vocabulary, and delve into the curious poetry of bureaucrats. For example, saying “management organs” instead of “regulatory agency” has a distinctively Soviet ring to it, even though China had more-modern concepts about regulatory agencies and refused to implement these Soviet bureaucratic models. Nonetheless, it sounds exotic, and sells books for academics.
For a business, you need to know that there are regulatory agencies in China and they apply administrative regulations and rules.
In the UCT context, this might imply making separate translators for businesses concerned with compliance, and separate translations for political scientists who are researching the tradition of hybrid Poet-Bureaucrats and Philosopher-Bureaucrats in China. The document actually means the same thing, albeit without poetry. Legal translators are also not qualified to translate poetry, when they try, it results in mangled word salad that serves no purpose at all.
Cultural Sensitivity
Cultural sensitivity involves adapting language, idioms, and references to align with the cultural norms and expectations of the target audience, ensuring that the content is authentic and avoids misunderstandings. This approach meets user needs by respecting the audience’s cultural identity and making the content more relevant to them as individuals. Culturally sensitive translations are key to effective global communication, and are a cornerstone of multinational governance in companies such as Microsoft (USA) and SheIn (China).
Regulatory guidance documents in China are typically written with intensive Chinese cultural assumptions, as are most legal memoranda and explainers. When translated to English, those same assumptions result in a document that is full of expressions and references that are part of a cultural context in China where those expressions are important and useful. For example, in Chinese culture, regulators (and even businesses) usually say “further strengthened” when issuing supplemental rules or policies, because readers will be seriously confused if you don’t.
Often, there are entire sentences that would not make any sense to a typical English speaking reader in the context. For example, a regulatory document that is talking about a new policy, may suddenly launch into a long paragraph praising the rapid development and great success of the economy. And again, the intended exercise of the regulatory intent is sandwiched in the sentence.
In some other places, regulators will use paragraph-long document titles with a couple words sandwiched between them that explain how they will use their regulatory discretion. For a reader in the culture, these are quite easy to understand and reading speed will often even accelerate because the content is quite routine and redundant. Additionally, the words used in Chinese are often half the length or a third of the length of the English target translation. As a result, the documents and titles will have to triple, and this can result in so much text that the reader will have a hard time of even identifying what the document is saying about the law.
These are usually easy to resolve, for example if a single sentence says “the People’s Republic of China” four times, then we can abbreviate this to PRC, thus making room for the legal content as the business reader has no need for pomp and circumstance. Furthermore, with cognitive testing, consider the scenario where there are six different statutes and regulations listed in a single sentence done like this. The translator putting “PRC” in front of the Act of Congress in front of the English sentence, but not in front of the next five legal titles but using the English prepositions and articles that show association. If you ask the reader what country these implementing regulations are from, everyone knows it’s the PRC, moreover their performance on substantive law reading comprehension questions will improve. The reason is primarily that their cultural background is inseparable from their ability to understand the document.
Audience Analysis
Audience analysis involves understanding the target audience’s language proficiency, cultural background, and context to tailor content that is accessible, relevant, and effective. By analyzing these factors, translators can ensure that the content are better suited to the needs of the end users enhancing comprehension and cultural relevance while improving user experience. Ultimately, audience analysis enables translators to optimize usability, contextual relevance, and cultural sensitivity. Audience-centric lossless compression is often needed for quasi-political regulatory texts from China.
Translations of statutes, regulations, and guidances produced by CBL are intended with English speaking audiences in mind. This sounds obvious, but it’s not. In the Chinese-English translation industry, the true audience of a document translated into English is Chinese native speakers in China. Since English speaking audiences are covered very well, let’s take a look at the primary audience of translations into English: Chinese speakers who rarely/never use English.
Often, the primary audience of diplomatic statements to the United States, are people in China. State media runs clips of English language statements being made to US and UK media and diplomats all the time. Databases of English translations of laws in China are mostly subscribed by native Chinese speakers, Yale’s database of translations produced in the United States, is primarily accessed from China. Statements by Chinese organizations are translated into English, and put into English textbooks, where they have audiences of hundreds of thousands of people.
People across the country use these translations as models for their own English skill, which they use to engage with foreign audiences, with vigorous encouragement from government policy. The English teaching-translation complex in China is a vast, multi-billion dollar industry employing millions of people. The industry got so vast and so out of hand that the government in recent years issued orders to shut the entire industry down for about three years, resulting in a massive black market and reboot in 2024. The phenomenon overall is very similar to the Olympics: people train for a decade or more to have a shot of performing brilliantly on the world stage, or at least in a conference call with the boss.
As compared with translations intended for the English speaking audience, these kinds of translations typically focus on acceptability to Chinese learners of English. If learners have doubts about the correctness of the translation, they will not accept it. Therefore, an English translation book in China is usually published involving an expert committee of zero native English speakers and several Chinese native speakers—therefore assuring acceptability to local learners. The result, China’s scholars have pointed out, is inventing an entirely novel language called Chinglish.
Acceptability to English as a second language learners, is however, not the same as acceptability to English speaking persons. For example again, Chinese law adopted the idea of a corporation in its business organizations law, and the idea of public limited companies in its securities law. In a well published regulatory decision about a real company, an audience of Blackrock managers looking at private equity fund investments in closed corporations in several different international jurisdictions, would want to know that investments are being placed in corporations and are being handled like corporations. Most translations will use invented Chinglish because that is what is acceptable to English learners, but hiding the fact the entity is an ordinary corporation means that all knowledge professionals have about corporations goes out the window. Thus, it is not useful for this audience.
Maximizing comprehension without loss of meaning
Lossless compression techniques can be used to ensure fidelity to the text without overloading the reader. For a typical translation reader working on business matters, cognitive tests show that many readers will not even comprehend or understand the existence of the regulatory intent being described. A native Chinese speaker will understand better, even when reading in English. There is also well known evidence for the phenomenon.
This phenomenon was previously exploited in order to funnel bribes into China by American corporations to circumvent the FCPA, as reported by Thomas West, President of the American Translators Association, and also resulted in a discrimination lawsuit against major FCPA law firms. The scheme was to prepare legal Chinese and Japanese reading comprehension tests by using word-for-word translations of American documents into Chinese and Japanese. Native English speakers with poor Chinese got high scores, native Chinese and Japanese would fail. While not scientific evidence, we are personally familiar with the scheme and also tested it using ALTA tests… CBL’s native speaking legal translation expert has documentation of a perfect score on an ALTA test taken as a mystery shopper.
The principle also works in reverse: a Chinese native speaker can understand translations of those regulations, better than can a native English speaker. In the scientific theory of linguistics, the general principle integrated into User Centered Translation is that the cultural content and context directly affects reading comprehension. Based on information we collected quietly from about 40 activist Chinese attorneys (who filed a discrimination lawsuit against Willkie, Farr, & Gallagher), the reading level proficiency drop is about eight grade levels. Some Chinese speakers with PhDs (ILR5) could not correctly answer at the 7th grade level (ILR3).
Therefore, there is strong evidence to use a different approach and ignore the cultural content, would actually cripple the business reader’s ability to apply and follow the law. While more research into this phenomenon could provide stronger proof, since native English speaking businesspeople do not need Chinese poetry and Marxist devotional literature, these can be condensed while better meeting the user’s purpose. However, at CBL, we also do recommend reading The Poems of Mao Zedong, for your personal cultural enrichment (Amazon) and appreciation of true beauty.
For legal memoranda where working directly with the author, typically adapting the source by localizing the content for the intended audience is a better route. This approach is taken in the European Union for legislation: revision of the target language results in revision of the source. Regulatory guidance documents from China however are already published without any adaptation, and it is important to ensure an accurate reflection of the original text without removing anything. That is, when attempting to increase cognitive accuracy by removing interference, avoid “lossy compression.” (loss of fidelity from compression)
In this respect, since these are digital texts, the higher-dimensions available in digital computers can be used to avoid lossless compression. That is, a paper document has only two dimensions, but human language processing is more sophisticated and non-linear, and AI language models of it need thousands of dimensions. For a regulatory translation, this can involve using a simple Wikipedia-style hyperlink of compressed information into a “semiotic” symbol. The user can if necessary access the deeper content, and the process of “semiosis” results in lossless fidelity. Moreover, the document achieves superior fitness for purpose, because instead of having PhDs comprehending at elementary school levels, they comprehend the document at PhD levels.