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HomeResourcesJapanese Patent Translation BulletinNo. 17: The Myths and Reality of Attempting to Transfer Japanese-to-English Translation Tasks to Developing Economies with Cheap Labor Japanese Patent Translation Bulletin No. 17 (July 17, 2010) The Myths and Reality of Attempting to Transfer Japanese-to-English Translation Tasks to Developing Economies with Cheap Labor Executive Summary:  You would not consider giving an attorney who had never had—and will very likely never have—the opportunity to sit in a courtroom the task of representing your client at trial. Why should you allow someone to give your Japanese documents to be translated to a translator who was prevented by the economic or political situation in his homeland from ever experiencing Japanese directly?" Some Technologies Can BeTransferred—with Varying Difficulty—to Developing Economies: Japanese-to-English Translation is Not One of Them These days it is difficult to buy a sophisticated electronic gadget that does not have numerous of its parts (if not the entire gadget itself) manufactured in China. In the field of "software" (including computer/software call centers and discovery document coding), India's low-cost labor supply is making significant contributions to cutting costs. One would think that these two venues, with their very low labor costs relative to the labor costs in the venues consuming their goods and services, would be logical targets for outsourcing of the annoyingly expensive task of translating Japanese documents into English. Think again, however; it is not as simple as attaching a Japanese file and sending it to China or India or to a translation broker the outsources to such venues. There are numerous not-so-obvious factors at work, and there are a number of myths—passed off as received wisdom—that delude people into thinking that the same solution that works with electronic gadgets works with Japanese-to-English translation. It does not. Myth 1: Translation is Labor and the Product of that Labor is a Commodity The activity of translation is not "labor," nor is its product a commodity. Still, there are some people who seem to think that the act of translation can be likened to "typing in a foreign language." Years of diligent study, real-world experience, and a continuing commitment to learning and professionalism are essential elements of Japanese-to-English translation. Myth 2: Translation is a Technology that Can Be Transferred Like the Technology of Software Development or IC Manufacturing If translation were a "paint by the numbers" activity, the above might be true. Clearly, it is not. In attempting to execute a translation, there are no manufacturing drawings to follow, no universally accepted quality standards which can be invoked to evaluate the product. As a sidelight, we have the rather puzzling situation in which a number of translation companies boast of ISO quality management certifications. One wonders what is the standard against which they are measuring quality. For the manufacture of electronics, you can send thousands of drawings and terabytes of data to China, followed up by a team of personnel to train the locals to make the gadgets you want to make, and your chances of success are reasonably good. This is simply, however, not the way translation works, but it is evident that some translation consumers (and some translation providers) have not yet given this much thought. Myth 3: Your Documents Are Being Entrusted to Highly Qualified Translators Perhaps, but you should also realize that a significant number of translation brokers plying their wares to US law firms regularly contact translators completely unknown to them, and are often not capable of judging a translator's qualifications. In fact, the question of qualifications is often completely forgotten in the frenzy to find a translator who will work for a low-enough per-word rate. Naturally, that frenzy often leads the agency (and your documents) to developing economies and their cheap labor. Myth 4: It is Possible to Become an Expert Japanese-to-English Translator Without Considerable Time Experiencing Japanese Firsthand. The famous translator Arthur Waley is reported to have translated the famous Heian Period work Genji Monogatari without ever having visited Japan. Those familiar with the Japanese language in general and how different Heian-period Japanese language is from the Japanese language of Waley's era might class such stories with the stories of persons who are "fluent" in 10 or 15 languages, the latter accounts often coming from people who don't have knowledge of the languages involved. Setting aside Arthur Waley's putatively amazing talents, real-world experience sends a clear message that it is highly unlikely that a non-Japanese will be able to acquire a deep understanding of Japanese without direct contact with the language for an extended period of time. This is next to impossible for people in Bangalore, Mumbay, or a number of Chinese venues that sell translations to US translation brokers (including, perhaps, that broker that contacted you or your paralegal this morning). I have met many non-Japanese who are very accomplished in Japanese. I cannot recall any who have pulled off the Arthur Waley trick of doing it entirely at a distance from Japan. There is a vast difference between the Japanese and Chinese languages. There is, to be sure, a great commonality of written characters between the two languages, but remember that Turkish and many other languages are written with the English alphabet. Writing systems are not the languages themselves, but rather the tools used to write those languages. In this sense a Chinese translation provider can boast no more special advantage in understanding Japanese language than can a monolingual English speaker boast of an advantage in understanding Turkish. Myth 5: The Chinese or Indian Translators Working on Your Documents Have Spent Long Years in Japan Studying their Craft It is very unlikely that low-cost translators in China and India have spent much time—and likely that they have spent no time—in Japan. At least with respect to Chinese, this situation is virtually guaranteed by the Japanese government, which still has a minimum income requirement for allowing Chinese to enter Japan even as tourists, although that income threshold has been lowered slightly recently to attract the more affluent Chinese as tourists to Japan. The reason for these restrictions, of course, lies in the realities of what happens when visitors from an economy with very low wages visit an affluent nation. With all the talk of prosperous Chinese in the coastal areas, the Chinese minimum wage is still about 1/10 the average Japanese starting salary. Surely the Japanese government realizes that opening the flood gates to truly low-paid Chinese would just result in many remaining as illegals in the lower-tier occupations in Japan. It is thus highly unlikely that many of the members of the labor market tapped by providers of dirt-cheap translation in China would be able to pack up and live in Japan for any extended period of study. This makes acquiring Japanese language ability difficult. But even without government of Japan blocking the visits of potential translators from developing economies, those economies and the prevailing political realities in those countries effectively deprive potential translators the chance to leave, to get out, and to move up. There has been no evidence of a hidden subculture of Chinese or Indians training in Japan to be translators. One Paradigm Does Not Fit All It is clear that the activity of translating a Japanese patent document, for example, and the difficulties of acquiring the required competencies to pursue that activity are radically different from learning the typical technologies that have been successfully transferred to developing nations. Mass-production translation brokers selling "rough but fast" translations (without spending much time speaking about the "rough" part), however, are not likely to pay much attention to this reality. Getting the order is more important to many of them. If we set aside the security issues, perhaps those huge piles of discovery documents might come back to you from the Asian Continent in a usable form. But do you want Japanese documents critical to your litigation or patent prosecution efforts translated by people who were selected because of their low wages? What's a Poor Law Firm to Do? One approach is to think carefully about whether you want your documents translated by people having qualifications unknown to even your translation agency. Another is to live with the danger that your discovery documents will be sent to the deep reaches of a developing Asian economy to be translated, while saving the more important documents for translation services that provide translations by known and knowable translators.

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