Last October I had the
chance to work as an English-Chinese interpreter in Philadelphia for a group of
110 Executive MBA students from the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. They
were on a two-week study tour in the US to hear a series of professors speak
about leadership, business culture, etc. The particular session that hired me
as interpreter featured Professor Todd Henshaw, Director of Executive Leadership
Programs at The Wharton School, who also headed the Leadership Program at the
United States Military Academy at West Point before joining Wharton.
I knew the West Point
Academy (in Chinese, “西点军校”)
has been a brand name very well recognized and admired in China as a cradle of
leaders, perhaps no less than Harvard, Wharton or any business school is. These
EMBA students came to learn what made the Academy a legend. Despite my
relatively limited experience with professional conference interpreting (I’m
more of a dabbler than professional), I managed to pass through the morning and
do an OK job (according to my audience and client), mainly because I was,
thankfully, somewhat familiar with the topics in the classroom – leadership
models, styles, and cultural differences in leadership. The three-and-a-half
hour class easily tops my list of the most interesting experiences in the year
2014.
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Picture of me and Prof.
Todd Henshaw during class break.
Projected on my suit was part of an image of Chinese soldier Lei Feng (雷锋), which he was using as an example of leaders who
“led by example”.
|
I’ll share one interesting
detail that left me thinking and smiling, an example of how something just
can’t get translated without losing a bit of its meaning.
The moment came up when
the professor pulled out a chart to describe the Western leadership style as more
task-focused, and the Eastern more relationship-focused.
Without much hesitation, I heard myself saying 关系导向 (guānxì
dǎoxiàng, or
relation-oriented). The professor, who was not supposed to know any Chinese at
all, apparently heard me saying Guanxi,
and stopped to correct me: “It’s not exactly Guanxi. It’s the leader-follower
relationship.”
It took me a second to
realize what’s going on: apparently the Professor had an accurate understanding
of what Chinese business people call guanxi
(关系; connections and
contacts in the business world), and here he insisted on distinguishing what he
called relationship from guanxi, explaining:
“Task-focused means getting the
work done. It’s the opposite of that. It’s focused on building a trusting and
caring relation with people in the workplace.”
I then took over to
clarify the difference, emphasizing the word 关怀 (guanhuai,
or caring) instead. I’m not sure how many of the 110 EMBA students captured the
nuance, but I saw a few of them nodding. The class went on, and the morning
quickly passed.
But here’s the paradox:
there is no better word in Chinese that means relationship other than guanxi!
How can you translate relationship-focus without
mentioning guanxi, or otherwise running into a 10-second long explanation of
the nuance? I would both blame how subtle Chinese is and praise how fascinating
it is: This guanxi (relation) is not that guanxi (connections).
While I was typing down
this anecdote, my memory was brought back to the Cross-Culture Leadership class
that I took myself some years ago. What I remember is, when hearing that the East
Asian concept of Guanxi was all about after-work boozes and Karaoke with
clients, my Canadian and European classmates nearly drooled…
