The first time I ever heard the word 説明責任/setsumei sekinin I was really thrown for a loop. I don't remember how I eventually found out, but this is a Japanese translation for the English word “accountability”.
This one really takes the cake for ridiculously bad Japanese coinages for English words. Bottom line: if you're trying to translate “accountability” into Japanese, please, please don't use this horrible word and just say アカウンタビリティ (or just 責任/sekinin, see below) instead. If you're trying to translate setsumei sekinin from Japanese into English, go ahead and translate it as “accountability”, but be aware that there may be not insignificant differences in nuance.
Long ago, the words accountable and accountability referred to accounts in the financial sense. An agent managed someone's money, and was responsible for reporting what was happening to the accounts, and/or shouldering the blame if something bad happened to them. The agent does not necessarily manage the money directly; he may be managing it through other people, but he remains the ultimately accountable person.
Over time, this word in English extended its meaning to non-financial contexts. In any case where there was a trust placed in one person by another, the first person needed to be able to explain to the second what was happening with the entrusted matter, but also take blame for things that went wrong, make up losses, or even resign or be fired if the situation was dire enough. The trust in question could be the trust placed in management of a company by its stockholders, or trust placed in a public official by their constituents.
I have not been able to determine when or by whom the word setsumei sekinin was coined. I'm sure the person had very good intentions, and was very confident of their English skills. But that doesn't change the fact that they got it dramatically wrong.
The problem is that accountability goes far beyond merely having the responsibility of explaining something. It extends to the responsibility for the actual outcome, notably including negative outcomes, as well as problems caused by others. If one was going to try to come up with better Japanese for accountability it probably should be 成果責任/seika-sekinin/outcome responsibility or 最終責任/saishū-sekinin/ultimate responsibility.
Many people over the years have taken a stab at inventing new Japanese words for unfamiliar English words, with decidedly mixed results. For instance I have been doing this so long that I actually remember when IBM was still pushing the use of the word 適用業務/tekiyō gyōmu, believe it or not, as a good translation for “application”. Good thing that didn't take hold!
But there is more going on here. Japanese originally had no word for responsibility whatsoever, because there was no notion of responsibility as such. Responsibility, to the extent it existed at all, was diffused across the entire society, or was implicit. It was not until the wholesale import of Chinese words along with their underlying concepts that the word sekinin entered the language. The 任/nin part just means a person with some role; the 責/seki had nuances of demanding, asking, obligating, blaming, questioning, or even punishing; these meanings are still found in the Japanese word 責める/semeru.
In other words the word sekinin seems to actually be closer to the English word “accountability” than “responsibility”. In many cases, the English word accountability could therefore simply be translated correctly as 責任/sekinin, although clueless reviewers would be likely to mark it as a mistranslation. To get closer to the meaning of the English word “responsibility”, which is more about having the obligation to actually do something yourself, what about 実行責任/jikkō-sekinin?
I take full sekinin for the content of this post.
Wow! I admit it never occurred to me that what I think of as a reasonably common word has such a short history.
You, like me, no doubt remember the old days when people were translating computer terms like "mouse" and "folder" for the first time. I tried really hard to get Apple Japan to use more familiar terms instead of throwing katakana at everything, but the locals had no interest and insisted that katakana was necessary because there is no direct translation (e.g. ネズミ was obviously wrong, they insisted, since it referred to an animal). I bet it was the same thought process when the first 19th century translators tried to think of equivalents for a word like "accountable" or "responsible". They probably assumed that the nuances were such no direct Japanese term would do.
Fascinating! I saw this word in a presentation from Adobe the other day about their Firefly AI art generation service. It had a section titled 「AI倫理に配慮」which listed three things:
説明責任
ダイバーシティ
無意識バイアス
説明責任 seemed out of place in this list. Responsibility for... explaining? This makes more sense now!