Maybe all the angst and hand-wrinigng over the alleged “China threat” was sparked by poorly translated Chinese reports. This academic article shows how this might be the case. Sample:
The analysts who produce the reports include information based on poorly translated documents and unreliable Chinese press accounts. They often fail to include information from more reliable Chinese open sources. Their selections of information often appear biased toward confirming the prevailing view of China.
Chinese analysts read these reports, as well as the recommendations of U.S. military planners on how to respond to the threats from China they describe. Those Chinese analysts then write their own reports and publish them in Chinese military journals that are in turn read by U.S. analysts. Like compound interest on a savings account, the consequences of erroneous intelligence grow larger over time. Small mistakes can mushroom into major misperceptions that become increasingly difficult to correct. The end result is increased suspicions among both parties that the other side is not genuinely interested in a cooperative approach to the security problems that divide them.
Could bad translation really be to blame for creating the impression of China as a military threat to America? The article offers some good examples that really made me wonder.
1
By bellevue
From my reading, it’s more from bad source (Hong Kong tabloid) than from poor translation. Yet translation is a serious problem, too. Scarcity in Arabic speaker costs us dearly.
BTW, if you don’t mind reading conservatives on China, I would suggest this author:
http://www.aei.org/research/nri/subjectAreas/pageID.1053,projectID.22/default.asp
I haven’t finished reading her works but already found something fresh and interesting. Hope you feel the same way.
June 19, 2006 @ 6:13 am | Comment
2
By Jing
Read the arms control wonk. He has written before about poor translations of original Chinese in regards to the issue of nuclear doctrine. By poor, I mean bass ackwards.
June 19, 2006 @ 1:33 pm | Comment
3
By dylan
Given that armscontrolwonk and the Bulletin of atomic scientists are hand-in-glove you basically are giving the same source there Jing. The “examples” they give are the same.
June 19, 2006 @ 2:36 pm | Comment
4
By Michael Turton
The idea is ridiculous. Of course translation errors will occur, it is inevitable. Can we make massive rises in military expenditure, hundreds of missiles pointed at Taiwan, clashes with Japan, and the occupation of Tibet disappear with a wave of our machine translation device?
Don’t think so.
June 19, 2006 @ 4:16 pm | Comment
5
By Tom - Daai Tou Laam
You blame “poor translation” rather than the obvious mendacity of the folks seeking certain results.
So the Bushevik cabal seeking to contain/encircle China isn’t forging documents and producing Curveballs (yet), but given their history, you know they’ll be stovepiping any tidbit regardless of veracity and rubbishing any and all contrary evidence.
June 19, 2006 @ 6:33 pm | Comment
6
By Fat Cat
This QDR incident is very much intelligence services producing whatever their boss in the White House wants to hear. And when things have gone wrong, they blame it on the translators. How convenient.
Of all the examples cited by Kulacki, only 2 are strictly speaking translation mistakes: (1) the incorrect translation of the modal verb “ying” and (2) the misinterpretation of the expression “junbei kongzhi”. Even so, the political analysts who compiled the report are obliged to verify their sources. I thought that’s what they are paid to do.
The “junbei kongzhi” example is very interesting though. I fed the phrase through machine-translation software, first time in simplified Chinese, then in pinyin. The result is surprising. The Chinese character input gave the correct translation “arms control”. The pinyin input gave 2 outputs: “arms control” and “armament spatial system”. By now, I’ve more or less figured out what the problems were: over-reliance on machine.
So I may not agree with Kulacki that the QDR mishap is a translation problem. But I do agree with him that there is a need for the US intelligent services to focus more on language and cultural training for their agencies, rather than on bigger and better translation machines.
June 19, 2006 @ 10:51 pm | Comment
7
By David
The U.S. Embassy Beijing summary translation and analysis of the book “Unrestricted Warfare” mentioned in this article gives some flavor of U.S. government reporting and analysis of the book at the time.
While the author makes important points about the fallacy of mirroring — reading the potential adversary’s study of oneself as the potential adversary’s own evil plot, he goes too far in his characterization of USG analysis of this issue.
Judge for your self — it is on the Federation of American Scientists website at
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/china/doctrine/index.html
under the heading “Conventional Forces”
June 20, 2006 @ 8:48 pm | Comment
8
By Mike
Kulacki is not making a big, sweeping claim here. He simply points out that the sources used by many government agencies are often unreliable. I’ve attended hearings on capitol hill, and he’s right: Oftentimes a remark on how unreliable Chinese government statistics are is followed by a claim based on the same statistics. If not that, there’s over-politicization and dramatization of every single issue. There just aren’t many people who even have their head in the right place to begin debating the China question. Those that do aren’t the people making the decisions, and the analysts who do know what’s going on are forced to produce politically-driven source material. Thus, the pointless data mining of tabloids and whatever else FBIS decides to serve up. We can’t expect every elected representative to be able to place a report on China in the proper historical and cultural context, so we need to do a better job of vetting sources and hiring analysts who can do it for them.
The language is a huge barrier, and overcoming it isn’t easy. There need to be more incentives for people to do so.
June 20, 2006 @ 10:11 pm | Comment
9
By Si
But surely you can expect the US intelligence society not to be using Chinese newspapers as an intelligence source?!?!? I couldn’t believe it. The mistranslation pointed out was utterly horrific. Ying translated as will?!??!? I still feel China is a future threat, but not to the US in the immediate future. I see it as a regional threat to peace.
June 20, 2006 @ 11:18 pm | Comment
10
By davesgonechina
Dylan said: “Given that armscontrolwonk and the Bulletin of atomic scientists are hand-in-glove you basically are giving the same source there Jing. The “examples” they give are the same.”
Dylan, is that a note of incredulousness I hear in the quotes around the word “examples”?
Michael Turton said: “The idea is ridiculous. Of course translation errors will occur, it is inevitable. Can we make massive rises in military expenditure, hundreds of missiles pointed at Taiwan, clashes with Japan, and the occupation of Tibet disappear with a wave of our machine translation device?
Don’t think so.”
I believe Richard’s idea was “Could bad translation really be to blame for creating the impression of China as a military threat to America?” No one said anything denying the four points you make. The points are fairly irrelevant to a Chinese military threat to the U.S. – if military spending increases are by their very nature a threat, then Canada ought to be extremely frightened right now. The military spending increases are small as a function of GDP, in comparison to U.S. spending, and a long way from bringing the Chinese military on par with the U.S. Meanwhile, Japanese politicians seem to be getting as much mileage out of saber-rattling as the Chinese, though I’m sure not to the point of risking their biggest trading partner. The Tibet issue, I might add, is apropos of nothing except perhaps hysteria. But hey, nothing helps one avoid thinking of another country having rational actors than labelling them evil for some shit that now-dead leaders did 60 years ago, right? Finally, I understand those missiles might be disconcerting considering where you live, but do not mistake Taiwan for a territory of the United States. This is a threat to an ally and US force projection in Asia, not the US itself. And perhaps an empty threat as well; screwing with US naval power in Asia would mean China would have to pick up the slack on defending sea routes its (and other Asian nations) economic progress depend upon – and they don’t appear to be in a position to do so. I can think of numerous other reasons why the situation requires much more careful thought than your brisk dismissal that any notion China is not a threat is a fantasy. Perhaps living under those Mainland missiles can give you some glimpse of how Chinese military leaders, charged with defending their country, might feel that the US has had nuclear “hot button” capability against China for decades, and how that might affect their thinking.
The point of the article, along with the other one Richard has linked on Michael Pillsbury, is that public analysis by the US military establishment on Chinese military capabilities has been less than spectacular when it comes to sourcing. While there may be legitimate reasons to be concerned about a Chinese threat to the U.S. through asymmetrical warfare, the materials cited for this suffer a lack of adequate evidence of intent. Everybody studies asymmetrical warfare now, because that’s what militaries do: they figure out how you could possibly use new shit to blow up other shit up. Asymmetrical, 4GW, Unrestricted – these are all just fancy new terms invented as shorthand for different ways of blowing shit up. Just because China studies it doesn’t mean they intend to use it. They might, oh I don’t know, want to defend themselves against it, perhaps?
Also, there’s a lack of distinction between actors within China. In November last year I posted on the one and only Chinese document to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Commission. It was a piece written for Shijie Zhongguo, a magazine. Contrary to popular belief, not everything written by Chinese professors or published by the Chinese press reflects government opinion. A bit of nationalist hawkish talk certainly gets permitted for the war porn (all those military magazines with hot, sexy pictures of aircraft carriers and big, hard, long tactical missiles) enthusiasts on the Mainland, but that’s not the same as a policy document. But there you go, that was pretty much all a US Federal China policy commission was given to get an idea of China’s naval plans – a bad attempt at reading Kant written for guys who stroke off looking at Soldier of Fortune. Not unlike the crank writing about “parasite satellites” on the internet mentioned in the Bulletin article.
June 23, 2006 @ 12:44 pm | Comment