Should “native language” claims be verified?

Ambrose Li wrote:

Everyone was asked to write an essay within a time limit. Everyone hated it (that is, including the native speakers). I kept failing until I decided to give up and said “I’ll just write whatever. I’ll fail this anyway.”

Balasubramaniam L. wrote:
I myself had been under the impression that every human being necessarily has one or the other language as his/her native language.

But this thread, particularly Ambrose Li’s posts, have enlightened me to the error of my belief. In this world of increasing migration, there are large numbers of people (of whom many would be translators) who technically do not have a native language confirming to any of the 10 definitions listed in my earlier post.

Oliver Walter wrote:

Previously, I simply stated that my native language (I called it Mother tongue) is English (U.K.). Now, I also state that I was born in England, spoke English at home and attended schools and universities in England.

Has anyone else made a similar change?

Jared wrote:

Hi writeaway,



I think it might be more complex than that. I am a native speaker of English, but I'm sure if you review my forum posts alone you will find some English for me to be embarrassed over. I know other native speakers of English who have much more difficulty stringing thoughts together in writing. Does that necessarily mean we're not native speakers of the language? How obvious or terrible does the mistake need to be? Is evaluation based solely on what I write in a forum? What is a potential client looking for in a native speaker of X, how are they defining it, what is expected? All things that probably need to be taken into account.

Oliver Walter wrote:

One very minor, but possibly interesting, consequence of this huge thread (over 1600 posts so far, but still not the longest ever) is that I have amended my CV to provide more evidence that my native language is English.

Previously, I simply stated that my native language (I called it Mother tongue) is English (U.K.). Now, I also state that I was born in England, spoke English at home and attended schools and universities in England.

Has anyone else made a similar change?

Oliver

Although the Chinese language did not achieve official language status under the Hong Kong Basic Law until 1990, Hong Kong was a de facto bilingual colony during the 154 years of British rule. Since the handover in July 1997, Chinese has been in much wider use in Hong Kong. According to the survey done by Li (1999), there are now more documents written in Chinese, both in government and commercial sectors. In particular, in recent years, there has been a surge of listing activities of Chinese enterprises in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. As the listing documents are required to be provided in both Chinese and English, the demand for translation services, especially Chinese-English translation, has risen.

Therefore, although most translation students in Hong Kong receive more training in translation from English into Chinese, today translators in Hong Kong need to translate from Chinese into English, contrary to what they had to do when Hong Kong was under the British governance. They need to write better English than most of them had previously thought, thus making it necessary for them to change from English as a passive language to English as an active language.

This is to some extent against the conventional wisdom that professional translators should translate into their mother tongue or language of habitual use only. In this corpus of job adverts, 19 or 29% explicitly require the applicants to translate both ways, English into Chinese as well as Chinese into English. For example, one job advert stated that one of the job duties was to “translate and proofread financial, legal and commercial documents from Chinese and English and vice versa”. This echoes Campbell’s (1998) observation of the Australian case in which commercial interests call for translators working into the second language. In fact, translation in second language is not only “common in languages with restricted distribution” (Pokorn 2005:37) but also “in larger linguistic communities which are pushed into a peripheral position because of the global distribution of power and in major-language societies when communicating with ethnic minorities. Snell-Hornby (1997; cited in Kelly et al. 2003: 26) summarizes this succinctly, “[T]ranslation into English non-mother tongue is a fact of modern life”. A comprehensive literature of the pervasive phenomenon of translation into second language can be found in Pavlović’s (2007) unpublished PhD thesis.

This job requirement of translating in and out of English could also be found in government organizations of Hong Kong. For example, the Official Language Division of the Civil Service Bureau of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and the Independent Commission Against Corruption stated that the prospective employees need to “translate into English and vice versa”.

Source: UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI INFORMATION ECONOMICS, THE TRANSLATION PROFESSION AND TRANSLATOR CERTIFICATION Andy Lung Jan Chan ISBN:978-84-691-9867/DL:T-141-2009

Ty Kendall wrote:

(reminder: the thread isn't about translation into English by non-native speakers, it's about the misrepresentation of one's native language).

I wonder how many times that has been said now.....

Professional associations in other professions are often delegated to enforce ethical professional conduct by formulating professional codes and rules of conduct describing the tasks and duties of their members. For example, the Architects Registration Board, UK (1999) has a Code of Conduct and Competence which contains 1,465 words with 10 standards and 33 notes. The Code of Professional Conduct of the IoL, UK (June 2001 Version) is of a comparable length of 1,562 words with 11 sections and 33 clauses.

More specifically, in the IoL Code there was one section concerning the “scope of work which Practitioners may undertake”, and it states that “Practitioners who act as translators shall work only into the language registered with the institute as their mother tongue or language of habitual use”. However, it is quite widely reported in many countries (for example, Poland) that there are “no qualified native speakers around and consequently reverse translation [has become] common practice” (TranslatorsCafé.com 2005). Another translator quite aptly points out that it “depends on the number of native speakers available and [the] level of complexity of the text” (ProZ 2007). In Hong Kong, for Chinese-English translation, as Caucasians make up a scant 0.5% of the total population of Hong Kong and because of cost considerations, native English speakers are seldom used. For a comprehensive survey of translation into second language, one can consult Pavlovic (2007).

In fact, IoL seemed to be aware of this when it issued its November 2007 Version of the Code of Professional Conduct. The above phrases are replaced by “Practitioners shall only accept work they believe they have the competence both linguistically and in terms of specialist knowledge or skill to carry out to the standard required by the client” and a detailed explanation is given as to what “competence” means:

The competence to carry out a particular assignment shall include: a sufficiently advanced and idiomatic command of the languages concerned, with awareness of dialects and other linguistic variations that may be relevant to a particular commission of work; the particular specialist skills required; and where appropriate, an adequate level of awareness of relevant cultural and political realities in relation to the country or countries concerned.

Phrases like “mother tongue” and “language of habitual use” are omitted in the new version of the professional code. This can be seen as a more flexible approach to the kinds of work that translators can take and more accurately reflect the actual situations in the translation marketplace.

Source: 196 UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI INFORMATION ECONOMICS, THE TRANSLATION PROFESSION AND TRANSLATOR CERTIFICATION Andy Lung Jan Chan ISBN:978-84-691-9867/DL:T-141-2009

Internet link to the document: http://tdx.cat/bitstream/handle/10803/8772/Chan.pdf?sequence=1

Balasubramaniam L. wrote:

Here is clear evidence that premier translator associations like the Institue of Linguists, UK, are slowly dumping the whole concept of native language and are taking a more practical approach to translation

Bernhard Sulzer wrote:
This is what many of us have been focusing on again lately - that it is not hard for native speakers to determine if somebody is a native speaker or a non-native speaker.

Bernhard Sulzer wrote:
In short: I, for example KNOW that I am a still a native speaker of German just as you know that you are a native English speaker, never mind any mistakes we might make occasionally.

Bernhard Sulzer wrote:
Note the difference between a "native speaker" and "excellent command of a second, non-native language". No matter how good someone is in a second language, even if they translate into it, they will simply not be able to write/ sound like a native speaker.

Bernhard Sulzer wrote:
I would not agree to a "near-native" category. There is nothing wrong with being an excellent non-native speaker of a second or third language.

traductorchile wrote:
I don’t like “near native” because it’s just as vague as “native” in terms of translation quality