‘Even if users in China have uncensored access to news … what they read or write may still be subject to automated censorship,’ researchers said.
A new study has found that popular translation services and software in mainland China automatically censor information deemed sensitive by the Chinese communist regime, choosing to skip certain sentences based on the content.
In its July 30 report, “Lost in Translation: Characterizing Automated Censorship in Online Translation Services,” Canada-based Citizen Lab tested five major Chinese online translation services—run by four Chinese companies and one American company—and found that they all automatically censor words, phrases, or sentences related to content deemed sensitive in China.
The four Chinese companies are Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and Youdao. Microsoft’s Bing Translator is the only foreign company allowed to be used in China.
After testing the translation services of the above companies, the researchers found 11,634 censorship rules targeting sensitive content.
The report highlighted, “The translation services’ censorship primarily targets political and religious expression that runs counter to the Chinese Communist Party’s agenda. Notably, we found a surprising absence of censorship relating to pornography, eroticism, or other more popular targets of censorship, suggesting that the censors either did not expect their censorship rules to be studied or are no longer concerned with hiding the censorship’s true political agenda.”
The Citizen Lab report said these translation review rules are targeted and automatically applied and will partially or completely omit the content that users want to translate.
The study said that except for Alibaba, several other companies “performed censorship silently and therefore possibly without the user’s knowledge.” Once sensitive words, lines, or sentences are triggered, the translation services will automatically and “silently omit triggering sentences or lines without any notification.”
Among the services, Alibaba had the strictest censorship, followed by Youdao and then Tencent. Baidu and Bing have relatively fewer censorship rules, the research found.
The researchers said in the report, “Our work reveals the unfortunate reality that, even if users in China have uncensored access to news or communications platforms, what they read or write may still be subject to automated censorship if they must translate between languages.”
The study found that almost all censorship rules apply to simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, English, or a mixture of these languages. However, the censorship more applies to translations from foreign languages to Chinese rather than from Chinese to other languages.
Chen Shih-min, an associate professor of political science at National Taiwan University, told The Epoch Times on July 31 that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) censorship of online translation services, especially from other languages to Chinese is because “it worries about Chinese people learning about some of the actual situations in China through foreign information.”
Chen said that he’s not surprised by the new findings in the report, “for a totalitarian and authoritarian regime like the CCP, it’s trying its best to shape the whole of China by controlling media and speech to create a false illusion of prosperity.”The report identified, “Most religious content censored was referred to Falun Gong, such as 法轮大法 (Falun Dafa) or ‘f a l u n d a f a’ (Falun Dafa in fullwidth characters). Microsoft’s Bing heavily censored Falun Gong, including many coded references to it such as 功轮法 (Gong Lunfa [Falun Gong backward]) and 发伦功 [a homonym of Falun Gong in Chinese].”
The report also added, “Many references to Falun Gong-associated news media outlets were censored, including 大纪元 (The Epoch Times) and NTDTV + 新唐人电视台 (NTDTV + NTDTV).”
In addition, the censorship rules targeted content and words related to “dissidents,” “party-state leaders,” criticism of the Chinese government or the CCP, and Tiananmen, which refers to the democracy movement and the Tiananmen massacre on June 4, 1989.
Wu Se-chih, a researcher at the Cross-Strait Policy Association in Taiwan, told The Epoch Times on July 31 that the heavy censorship of religion shows that the CCP is not confident in its own rule. “It’s worried that if people have the freedom of religious belief, the Party will lose its absolute interests. In other words, under the CCP’s autocratic system, when leaders want to deify themselves, if there is religious freedom, it will not be conducive for them to do it or to exercise the ruling authority of an autocratic system or a totalitarian system.”
Chen said, “Because the CCP is an atheistic regime, it’s very worried that Falun Gong, a belief following truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, may break the brainwashing it’s done on the Chinese people and will pose a challenge to the legitimacy of the CCP’s rule.”
He added that in the past couple of years since the COVID-19 restrictions were lifted, it has been obvious that the Chinese economy has continued to be sluggish and deteriorate. “It undermines the legitimacy of the CCP, especially Xi Jinping’s rule. Of course, it will be very concerned about the media groups, such as The Epoch Times, that report truthfully on the real situation of the CCP and related news. Of course, it must censor them so that the Chinese people do not know about the truth.”
Regarding the heavy censorship in communist China, Wu was confident that “ordinary Chinese people can find ways or software to circumvent the CCP’s firewall and use foreign translation software or translation services in democratic countries, then they will be able to see more of the truth.”
Luo Ya contributed to this report.