Scrubbing A Trade Deal: Translators Get Behind The Ears Of The TPP
Ever since the Obama administration announced last week it had agreed to a massive trade deal, called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, lawmakers have been saying they must review the agreement's specific language before passing judgment.
"Without having read it ... I'm going to reserve my time to read it," Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, told NPR when asked whether TPP would win support in Congress.
So, why don't members of Congress just take a look at the TPP? If the administration has signed off on the trade agreement involving the U.S. and 11 other Pacific Rim countries, then where is the document?
For now, it is indisposed while getting cleaned up.
But it's not taking a shower. Rather, the TPP is getting a "legal scrub."
That's the term used by the U.S. Trade Representative's office to describe the process that follows a handshake deal. Lawyers, translators and other staffers have to come up with the final, detailed language that ensures the deal is clear in each country.
That's not easy. TPP includes Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam. So documents have to line up precisely in English, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Malay and more.
The deal was closed on Monday, and later in the week, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman told reporters that scrubbing all of the words in a document covering 30 chapters may take about a month.
Then, the TPP will be made available online. Congress will have at least 90 legislative days to review it. Both the House and Senate must approve implementing legislation for TPP to take effect.
For now, everyone can see overview material posted by the USTR office.
Deciding whether to approve the TPP will be difficult for many lawmakers. Most business groups strongly support it, but labor groups, environmentalists and others — including many Tea Partiers — are fiercely opposed.
As long as the "scrubbing" goes on, the lawmakers can keep their hands clean of the TPP. But at some point in 2016, they will be pushed to make a decision. Most analysts are predicting the vote will happen between Easter and Memorial Day.
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Transcript
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
And now it's time for our regular segment we call Words You'll Hear. That's where we try to understand the stories we'll be hearing more about in the coming days by parsing some of the words associated with them. Today, our word, or in this case phrase, is legal scrub. Yes, it sounds like a new skincare product, but it's actually a phrase we'll be hearing in connection with a massive new trade deal. Here to tell us more is Marilyn Geewax. She is a senior business editor for NPR. Marilyn, thanks for joining us.
MARILYN GEEWAX, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Michel.
MARTIN: So what's a legal scrub, and what does it have to do with trade?
GEEWAX: (Laughter) It's not for acne. This is - the U.S. trade representative uses this phrase to try to describe what's going to be happening in the coming days with the Trans-Pacific Partnership. That's that huge agreement that brings together the United States, Japan, 10 other countries around the Pacific Ocean. But now, they actually need to turn all of those agreements - everything they think they agreed to has to be turned into very legal language. So you need translators, lawyers, all kind of staffers to go through all these mountains of documents and make sure that they actually say what you intended to say. And that's trickier than you might think, you know, because you're talking about 12 different countries. There are a lot of languages involved. In a little tiny place like Singapore, they have four official languages. So all of this has to be scrubbed, make it shiny and nice and exact, and then they have something that they can actually take to their legislatures for passage.
MARTIN: So is this just a formality, or is it actually more important than that?
GEEWAX: Well, it's sort of turning out to be politically important, in the United States especially. You know, we've got a lot of turmoil going on in Congress. Congress will have to sign off on this deal. So by having this legal scrub not yet completed, it allows everyone involved to say you know what? - I really need to see what the language says. And it's true. I mean, you really do want to see the details. Some of these things can be very tricky, you know, complex legal issues. The members of Congress want their staffers to really go over it and make sure that, you know, if you have a dairy farmer in your district that it's really going to help that person. So they want this scrubbed. They want the perfect translation. They want to see the final deal. But it also gives them a legitimate way to say hold on, I've got to take another look.
MARTIN: Is this a public process? For example, do the lawyers involved have to allow the public to review their work? I mean, who gets the final say if people disagree over what the meaning of a phrase is?
GEEWAX: Yeah. They really do - they literally work that out privately. They have to sit there and argue back and forth - what does this word mean in Japanese, what does it mean in English - you know, and come up with exact mirror language so that it's all the same. But when it's done, it will have to be released to the public. And then everyone can see it for a minimum of 60 days that it's required for the public to be able to see it. And Congress will have even longer than that to study these details. So this scrubbed version will be available to us.
MARTIN: And so the scrub is supposed to take about a month as I understand it.
GEEWAX: Yes.
MARTIN: Just very briefly if you would - who's for it and who's against it? I understand that this isn't really a neat, right-left divide on this.
GEEWAX: Boy, it's really a complicated situation. Most Democrats are against it, although those who tend to face the Pacific...
MARTIN: Except for the president. He's kind of a Democrat - big Democrat, important.
GEEWAX: Well, the president is an important Democrat who says we need to pivot to Asia. And all the Democrats that are sort of living on the nation's left coast, all of the folks who face the Pacific in California, Oregon, Washington, they tend to be for it, those Democrats. Most Republicans favor a trade deal, but some are very skeptical about this president. And they literally have said - some have said if he negotiated it, then I can't trust it. So there are some Republicans who are opposing this as well.
MARTIN: NPR senior business editor Marilyn Geewax telling us about the legal scrub. Marilyn, thanks so much for joining us.
GEEWAX: Oh, you're welcome. It was fun to be with you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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