State agency messaging in Hmong gets lost in translation
The Minnesota Department of Human Services posted this revised translation on its Facebook page in February after Hmong community members complained that the first version was riddled with errors.
Minnesota Department of Human Services
If you’ve ever tried to learn a second or third language, you know translating words from one language to another is not a one-to-one deal. Professional translators need to know the nuances of both languages to communicate meaning.
The Minnesota Department of Human Services translates some of its documents into five languages besides English, according to its website. Those are Hmong, Russian, Somali, Spanish and Vietnamese.
The website says other languages are available based on need. Some of the agency’s Hmong and Somali translations drew criticism recently, as freelance journalist Gustav DeMars reported for Sahan Journal. They reviewed translations in the five other languages. And Somali speakers found one of the sentences was also lost its meaning to a literal translation.
The Minnesota Department of Human Services shared this post on its Facebook page in February. It also shared five versions translated into Hmong, Somali, Vietnamese, Spanish and Russian.
Minnesota Department of Human Services
DHS told him community members and staff had previously found problems with that company’s translations, and the Facebook posts were shared by mistake. He reached out to LATN Translation Services several times for comment and didn’t hear back.
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Lee Pao Xiong is the founding Director of the Center for Hmong Studies at Concordia University in St. Paul and is familiar with the topic. He joined MPR News guest host Emily Bright.
Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.
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Audio transcript
EMILY BRIGHT: If you have ever tried to learn a second or a third language, you know translating words from one language to the other is not a one-one deal. It is tricky. Professional translators need to know the nuances of both languages to communicate meaning. The Minnesota Department of Human Services translates some of its documents into five languages besides English, according to its website. And those are Hmong, Russian, Somali, Spanish, and Vietnamese. And the website says other languages are available based on need. Now, some of the agency's Hmong and Somali translations drew criticism recently, as freelance journalist Gustav DeMars reported for Sahan Journal.
GUSTAV DEMARS: The Minnesota Department of Human Services put out a Facebook post, which essentially was prompting people to update their personal information like address phone number and all that if they were covered by medical assistance or MinnesotaCare as to avoid any interruptions in their insurance coverage. And a lot of people were commenting criticizing the Hmong translation of it, saying that it didn't make sense or it was very hard to understand. One of the main things I heard from Hmong speakers about the translation was that it was just entirely too literal to the point where it lost its meaning, essentially. It would just be very hard to understand for most Hmong speakers.
EMILY BRIGHT: Sahan Journal reviewed translations in the five other languages. And Somali speakers found one of the sentences was also lost in-- lost its meaning with a literal translation.
GUSTAV DEMARS: A lot of the initial comments on this post were suspecting that the agency had used Google Translate or some sort of machine translation service like that. The Department told me that they do not use Google Translate or any machine translation services, but instead contract third-party translation services. And so these specific translations from this post came back from one translation service called LATN Language Solutions, which the Department says it stopped working with a while back.
EMILY BRIGHT: DHS told him community members and staff had previously found problems with the company's translations and the Facebook posts that were shared by mistake. He reached out to LATN Translation Services several times for comment, didn't hear back. Well, this is one example of something our next guest has seen quite a bit of. Lee Pao Xiong is the founding director of the Center for Hmong Studies at Concordia University in St. Paul. And he is on the line. Welcome to the program.
LEE PAO XIONG: Thank you. Thank you for having me on.
EMILY BRIGHT: Oh, my pleasure. Well, I'll bet you have a treasure trove of bad translations that you have seen. Could you share a few with us?
LEE PAO XIONG: Yes, you know, we've been collecting over over the years. And I think one of the most glaring one was the one that was put out by McDonald's several years ago. And they tried to reach out to the Hmong community, try to capture the market by putting up a translation about the breakfast sandwich and it was plastered all over the East Side of St. Paul and Frogtown. And we all looked at this like, what are you trying to say? I mean, there's no space in between. And so they assumed that the Hmong writing system is similar to the Lao and the Thai where there's no space in between. And so we all just laughed at that.
EMILY BRIGHT: So did it--
LEE PAO XIONG: McDonald's pulled that out.
EMILY BRIGHT: Did it translate to something strange or it was just like unreadable?
LEE PAO XIONG: It's just unreadable. And I think it's also missed the message, basically, of what it's trying to convey to us. But then we get so distracted by just the translation itself that it has no meaning.
EMILY BRIGHT: Right, well, what do you think is going wrong here with--
LEE PAO XIONG: I think--
EMILY BRIGHT: Go ahead.
LEE PAO XIONG: Yeah, I think what's happening is that these translation businesses out there, they go out in the community and they identify people and to ask them to translate. And there's no-- I would say there's no accountability. And there's no way of just screening how good the translation was.
And so they just put it out there. Like the McDonald's one, they contracted with a translation company based out of New York, right? And so here we are in the Twin Cities. We have 100,000-plus Hmong people here and variety of businesses as well as individuals that could have reached out. They could reach out to me.
EMILY BRIGHT: Yeah, there's so much talent here, my goodness.
LEE PAO XIONG: Yeah, and so-- and I'm just looking also looking at here, you know, like Science Museum of Minnesota, they put a welcome sign together that say [HMONG]. It's like we're happy to capture you, right, catch you.
EMILY BRIGHT: Oh, no.
LEE PAO XIONG: Instead of saying, you know what? [HMONG], we welcome you. So things like that. I see St. Paul Public Schools, I mean, they're trying to talk about their schools, the translation, that's my school, that my school looks like the world I live in." And the translation itself is, lots of value, lots of things to be liked. That's the Hmong translation.
[CHUCKLING]
That's different from the English version of, you know, that's my school, looks like the world I live in. That's totally different.
EMILY BRIGHT: Yeah, and when education centers are-- send out messages that are wrong, you just think, oh, that's really going against the message, even though it can happen so easily. Are you also seeing differences between like Green/Blue Hmong and White Hmong where people are messing up the language that way?
LEE PAO XIONG: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that-- I think the assumption is that we are a monolithic community. We are not. We have two dialects. And when you go outside of the United States, you have multiple dialects out there, multiple Hmong dialect. Each regions have different vocabularies.
So for the two most common one here in the United States is White Hmong and also Blue Hmong. And it's also interchangeable with Blue and Green.
EMILY BRIGHT: OK.
LEE PAO XIONG: But, for example, the word for wife is [HMONG]. And [HMONG] is the White Hmong version. [HMONG] is the Blue Hmong version. The [HMONG] for White Hmong and for Blue Hmong it's like [HMONG]. So as you can see, this big, big difference, even, you know, again, the word for sugar cane. For White Hmong, we call it [HMONG]. But for Blue Hmong, it's [HMONG].
EMILY BRIGHT: Yeah, big differences.
LEE PAO XIONG: Big, big difference in a lot of implication. And I think what's also very important is that in the old country, you have a White Hmong village, you have a Blue Hmong village. And sometimes, some of those villagers don't interact with each other. And so for many of the people who are not familiar with the White Hmong, they may not understand what they're talking about and vice versa.
But we have a lot of common words, but we have a lot of different words as well. So the different vocabularies, that's very few. But most, you know, it's very common that sometimes we will understand each other. Just like Lao and Thai, if you speak Thai, you can easily understand Lao. If you speak Lao, you can easily understand Thai.
EMILY BRIGHT: Now, you sometimes get requests to review translations, right?
LEE PAO XIONG: Yes, and I get requests from people to edit some of the translations that's been put out there. And sometimes I look at it and I would tell the translation agency, this is a bunch of crap, you know? You can't pay me enough to retranslate all of this. You know, you're only giving me $10, you know?
You say, we'll pay you $10 to edit this. And I said, this is a legal document. I don't want to assume the liability.
EMILY BRIGHT: Right.
LEE PAO XIONG: Because everything that-- everything that you translate in there, it's all wrong. Might as well just toss it. Otherwise, you have to redo it. So a lot of that thing.
And I think you talked about using Google Translate. It may be that many of the people that they contract with may be young people who don't speak the language and don't understand the-- don't know the deep vocabularies. And so they turn to Google Translate. And so sometimes, some of our colleagues when we see some translation, wrong translations we will often put it on Google Translate just to see whether it sounds-- if it came from Google Translate. And some of them actually came from Google Translate.
EMILY BRIGHT: OK. So we're just about out of time. I'm having so much fun talking with you. But just briefly, how can companies and public institutions do a better job of this?
LEE PAO XIONG: I think you need to-- you need to get the translation out to a third eye or second eye to take a look at. The other thing is that I think to assume that everyone speaks White Hmong, because all the majority of the translations are translated in-- are in White Hmong. I think it's when you talk about equity and you talk about making sure that you have accurate translations, it's also important to make sure that you translate the text into the Blue Hmong language as well.
EMILY BRIGHT: OK, well, thank you so much for your time.
LEE PAO XIONG: Thank you. Thank you.
EMILY BRIGHT: Lee Pao Xiong is the founding director of the Center for Hmong Studies at Concordia University in St. Paul. I wish we had time to talk more. You can find Gustav DeMars' story at sahanjournal.com.
GUSTAV DEMARS: The Minnesota Department of Human Services put out a Facebook post, which essentially was prompting people to update their personal information like address phone number and all that if they were covered by medical assistance or MinnesotaCare as to avoid any interruptions in their insurance coverage. And a lot of people were commenting criticizing the Hmong translation of it, saying that it didn't make sense or it was very hard to understand. One of the main things I heard from Hmong speakers about the translation was that it was just entirely too literal to the point where it lost its meaning, essentially. It would just be very hard to understand for most Hmong speakers.
EMILY BRIGHT: Sahan Journal reviewed translations in the five other languages. And Somali speakers found one of the sentences was also lost in-- lost its meaning with a literal translation.
GUSTAV DEMARS: A lot of the initial comments on this post were suspecting that the agency had used Google Translate or some sort of machine translation service like that. The Department told me that they do not use Google Translate or any machine translation services, but instead contract third-party translation services. And so these specific translations from this post came back from one translation service called LATN Language Solutions, which the Department says it stopped working with a while back.
EMILY BRIGHT: DHS told him community members and staff had previously found problems with the company's translations and the Facebook posts that were shared by mistake. He reached out to LATN Translation Services several times for comment, didn't hear back. Well, this is one example of something our next guest has seen quite a bit of. Lee Pao Xiong is the founding director of the Center for Hmong Studies at Concordia University in St. Paul. And he is on the line. Welcome to the program.
LEE PAO XIONG: Thank you. Thank you for having me on.
EMILY BRIGHT: Oh, my pleasure. Well, I'll bet you have a treasure trove of bad translations that you have seen. Could you share a few with us?
LEE PAO XIONG: Yes, you know, we've been collecting over over the years. And I think one of the most glaring one was the one that was put out by McDonald's several years ago. And they tried to reach out to the Hmong community, try to capture the market by putting up a translation about the breakfast sandwich and it was plastered all over the East Side of St. Paul and Frogtown. And we all looked at this like, what are you trying to say? I mean, there's no space in between. And so they assumed that the Hmong writing system is similar to the Lao and the Thai where there's no space in between. And so we all just laughed at that.
EMILY BRIGHT: So did it--
LEE PAO XIONG: McDonald's pulled that out.
EMILY BRIGHT: Did it translate to something strange or it was just like unreadable?
LEE PAO XIONG: It's just unreadable. And I think it's also missed the message, basically, of what it's trying to convey to us. But then we get so distracted by just the translation itself that it has no meaning.
EMILY BRIGHT: Right, well, what do you think is going wrong here with--
LEE PAO XIONG: I think--
EMILY BRIGHT: Go ahead.
LEE PAO XIONG: Yeah, I think what's happening is that these translation businesses out there, they go out in the community and they identify people and to ask them to translate. And there's no-- I would say there's no accountability. And there's no way of just screening how good the translation was.
And so they just put it out there. Like the McDonald's one, they contracted with a translation company based out of New York, right? And so here we are in the Twin Cities. We have 100,000-plus Hmong people here and variety of businesses as well as individuals that could have reached out. They could reach out to me.
EMILY BRIGHT: Yeah, there's so much talent here, my goodness.
LEE PAO XIONG: Yeah, and so-- and I'm just looking also looking at here, you know, like Science Museum of Minnesota, they put a welcome sign together that say [HMONG]. It's like we're happy to capture you, right, catch you.
EMILY BRIGHT: Oh, no.
LEE PAO XIONG: Instead of saying, you know what? [HMONG], we welcome you. So things like that. I see St. Paul Public Schools, I mean, they're trying to talk about their schools, the translation, that's my school, that my school looks like the world I live in." And the translation itself is, lots of value, lots of things to be liked. That's the Hmong translation.
[CHUCKLING]
That's different from the English version of, you know, that's my school, looks like the world I live in. That's totally different.
EMILY BRIGHT: Yeah, and when education centers are-- send out messages that are wrong, you just think, oh, that's really going against the message, even though it can happen so easily. Are you also seeing differences between like Green/Blue Hmong and White Hmong where people are messing up the language that way?
LEE PAO XIONG: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that-- I think the assumption is that we are a monolithic community. We are not. We have two dialects. And when you go outside of the United States, you have multiple dialects out there, multiple Hmong dialect. Each regions have different vocabularies.
So for the two most common one here in the United States is White Hmong and also Blue Hmong. And it's also interchangeable with Blue and Green.
EMILY BRIGHT: OK.
LEE PAO XIONG: But, for example, the word for wife is [HMONG]. And [HMONG] is the White Hmong version. [HMONG] is the Blue Hmong version. The [HMONG] for White Hmong and for Blue Hmong it's like [HMONG]. So as you can see, this big, big difference, even, you know, again, the word for sugar cane. For White Hmong, we call it [HMONG]. But for Blue Hmong, it's [HMONG].
EMILY BRIGHT: Yeah, big differences.
LEE PAO XIONG: Big, big difference in a lot of implication. And I think what's also very important is that in the old country, you have a White Hmong village, you have a Blue Hmong village. And sometimes, some of those villagers don't interact with each other. And so for many of the people who are not familiar with the White Hmong, they may not understand what they're talking about and vice versa.
But we have a lot of common words, but we have a lot of different words as well. So the different vocabularies, that's very few. But most, you know, it's very common that sometimes we will understand each other. Just like Lao and Thai, if you speak Thai, you can easily understand Lao. If you speak Lao, you can easily understand Thai.
EMILY BRIGHT: Now, you sometimes get requests to review translations, right?
LEE PAO XIONG: Yes, and I get requests from people to edit some of the translations that's been put out there. And sometimes I look at it and I would tell the translation agency, this is a bunch of crap, you know? You can't pay me enough to retranslate all of this. You know, you're only giving me $10, you know?
You say, we'll pay you $10 to edit this. And I said, this is a legal document. I don't want to assume the liability.
EMILY BRIGHT: Right.
LEE PAO XIONG: Because everything that-- everything that you translate in there, it's all wrong. Might as well just toss it. Otherwise, you have to redo it. So a lot of that thing.
And I think you talked about using Google Translate. It may be that many of the people that they contract with may be young people who don't speak the language and don't understand the-- don't know the deep vocabularies. And so they turn to Google Translate. And so sometimes, some of our colleagues when we see some translation, wrong translations we will often put it on Google Translate just to see whether it sounds-- if it came from Google Translate. And some of them actually came from Google Translate.
EMILY BRIGHT: OK. So we're just about out of time. I'm having so much fun talking with you. But just briefly, how can companies and public institutions do a better job of this?
LEE PAO XIONG: I think you need to-- you need to get the translation out to a third eye or second eye to take a look at. The other thing is that I think to assume that everyone speaks White Hmong, because all the majority of the translations are translated in-- are in White Hmong. I think it's when you talk about equity and you talk about making sure that you have accurate translations, it's also important to make sure that you translate the text into the Blue Hmong language as well.
EMILY BRIGHT: OK, well, thank you so much for your time.
LEE PAO XIONG: Thank you. Thank you.
EMILY BRIGHT: Lee Pao Xiong is the founding director of the Center for Hmong Studies at Concordia University in St. Paul. I wish we had time to talk more. You can find Gustav DeMars' story at sahanjournal.com.
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