Expressing the agent in Chinese

I've been meaning to post this for a while now, since I saw this advertisement at my uncle's clinic here in Singapore. It's an ad for some type of hair loss treatment.

In English, the ad reads: "Male pattern hair loss can be treated".

In contrast, the Chinese (Mandarin) ad reads: 医生可以治疗你的脱发问题。yīshēng kěyǐ zhìliáo nǐ de tuōfà wèntí which can be roughly translated as 'The doctor can treat your hair loss problem.'

For now, let's just ignore the fact that English version obligatorily requires some sort of article with doctor and that doctor must be specified as being singular or plural, while the Chinese one does not. (Given the ad's location in a clinic where it was in full view of waiting patients, I interpreted it as referring to the doctor working in the clinic that day, whom the waiting patient was going to see.) Also ignore the fact that the English one specifies this as a male problem, while the Chinese one assumes that the reader is male.

What's important to note is that the Mandarin version actually specifies the agent, the person who will be undertaking the action, 医生 yīshēng 'doctor'. On the other hand, the English version uses a passive construction where the agent no longer needs to be mentioned, though it could be if we wanted to, by simply adding the phrase by the doctor. By using the passive voice in English, one can omit the agent / doer of the action and still construct a grammatical sentence. This is one common use of the passive voice in English, and a fairly important one, so please ignore 'blanket rules' that state to 'avoid the passive voice' at all costs - it does have its uses!

With the current buzz on language and its potential effects on thought and behaviour, and given that only the Mandarin one expressly mentions an agent, the 'doctor', I would be tempted to ask this question: If the treatment fails, would a Mandarin speaker who has read the advertisement in Mandarin be more likely to blame the doctor than an English speaker who has read it in English?

The obvious hypothesis would be that a Mandarin speaker would be more likely to assign blame to the doctor if the treatment fails than an English speaker would. Why? Because in the Chinese version, 医生 'doctor' is explicitly mentioned.

Now, if this hypothesis were proven correct, could one then conclude that it was due to some fundamental difference in the way that Mandarin and English are structured or view the world?

I would definitely say, no.

The problem is, the English version could easily have read: A doctor can treat your hair loss problem, using the active voice which means that the agent has to be mentioned / one must mention the agent. Mandarin also has a way of marking the equivalent of the passive using 被 bèi (see here for more info), although writing 脱发问题,可以治疗 would be acceptable, and would be closer to 'Hair loss problem can be treated', with 脱发问题 'hair loss problem' placed at the front as a topic.

You might then say that it is more common in Mandarin Chinese to mention the agent here - a Google search for 脱发问题可以被治疗 'hair can be treated' (using 被 bèi)  doesn't come up with identical results, while most results mention some sort of force / process, e.g. 头发移植 'hair transplants', 锌 'zinc' and 中草药 'Chinese herbal medicine' that might cure hair loss problems.

The problem is, there are numerous reasons why 医生 'doctor' was mentioned explicitly in the Chinese version, and not the English one. One reason might be a cultural expectation among Mandarin speakers (or in the case of Singapore, older Hokkien and Teochew speakers who also know Mandarin) that it is up to the doctor to help them. Older Chinese speakers, who are less likely to know English, are more likely from a generation that held doctors in the highest esteem and would not question their actions. By mentioning 医生 'doctor', the copywriter / translator of the advertisement in Chinese could simply be tapping into the revered status accorded doctors, since this would likely promote sales. Another reason might be that the copywriter simply felt the need to be more explicit in directing Chinese speaking patients to the doctor for help.

Clearly, it would be impossible to simply compare two versions of a sentence in two different languages and start making hypotheses about the effects of language on thought and behaviour. However, I thought it would be a nice way to illustrate some of the problems faced by researchers in this field, especially if we start considering a feature (like an agent) that could be omitted in a language, but are often not. Is such a tendency the result of the structure of a language affecting thought, or is it thought and cultural expectations that result in this particular use of language / stylistic choice?

In order to exclude the possibility of the latter, we go to Roman Jakobson's quote “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey”. It would therefore be more fruitful to look at features of English that must be mentioned, like the use of either an indefinite or definitie article with singular nouns in English or the marking of all countable nouns as either singular or plural - all features that Chinese does not oblige its speakers to mention.

[On a related note, here's a link to Lena Boroditsky's article in the Wall Street Journal on her work with English, Japanese and Spanish speakers and the perception of blame (23/07/2010): Lost in Translation
Here's a Language Log post that critically examines this study (26/07/2010): Boroditsky on Whorfian navigation and blame]