Should “native language” claims be verified?

José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:

And it's not my personal case either. There are some people who have spoken English from the day they started babbling as babies through their entire lives so far. Most of them think I am a native speaker of EN, and I tell them I'm not.

Is it not perhaps time to abolish the "native" attribute?

It is misleading and unconstructive. It implies that any native speaker has the required target-language writing ability, and any non-native does not. This is patently not the case.

Translators are professional writers, and the consensus in the profession, at least in the so-called "developed" countries, is that a certain standard of writing ability can be expected of them. It should not be surprising that many natives fail to reach this standard. Equally, some (the actual proportion is moot) non-natives reach a standard which may be equivalent to, or even better than, that of most natives.

The level of writing skill required arguably differs according to the type of text to be translated, as has already been pointed out. Some non-native translators routinely have their texts revised by a native speaker, so the service they are offering is arguably that of a "native", and they may declare more than one native language in good faith in consideration of this fact. These distinctions are not adequately addressed by the crude native/non-native distinction. So why not abolish it?

I am not suggesting that the standard for target-language writing ability be lowered. I am suggesting that it be recognized for what it is, and not made dependent upon the vague attribute of "native".

I have no formal qualification in my main specialist subject. (I am a member of an industry association and I regularly attend training events, but my knowledge has never been formally tested.) I routinely translate from a language in which I hold only a British A level, a university entrance-level qualification equivalent to approximately seven years' school tuition; I am self-taught in this language and have received at most 25 hours' (translation-related) tuition in it. No one has ever suggested to me that on the basis of these formal qualifications or lack of them, I am not qualified to translate from this particular language or in my main specialist field. My qualification is judged, if at all, on the results. Why can the same approach not be taken with the target language(s) offered by a translator?

...
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... the "natives" need to face certain realities, one being that translations into English are more often than not intended for an international audience and therefore subject to different criteria. At the same time, many non-natives also have some serious facts to face. Significantly, many such translators seriously overestimate their own writing ability in their foreign language(s). This is partly because this ability is frequently judged by their comprehension skills and oral fluency, which are unsuitable yardsticks, and because these translators have no direct contact with their readership, who may well find the results perplexing, hilarious, or both.

Finally, globalization has suddenly placed many of us in competition with colleagues in parts of the world whose living costs are supposedly a fraction of ours and whose prices we cannot hope to match. The other side of the coin is that some of us have staked our reputations (justified or not) on what we consider to be appropriate standards. The last thing we are going to do, and can afford to do, is to lower these standards to accommodate the new competition. The free market cuts both ways, I'm afraid.

Marc

Bernhard Sulzer wrote:



How do you know, Michael, I mean for sure? What definition are you using for native speaker?
Just wondering.

B

[Edited at 2012-09-12 02:23 GMT]

I spent some years as Chief Editor responsible for the technical publications of a European association having, as its members, 'household name' institutions from around 60 countries in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. In that capacity I was frequently called upon to read and assess manuscripts submitted by those countries' top scientific and engineering experts in our field. We published in English and French and 95% or more of manuscripts were submitted in various shades of English.

Working at the association's HQ I also had regular contact with around 220 colleagues from over 20 countries boasting conversational abilities, between them, in around 50 languages in all. In other words, I had much opportunity to observe my colleagues' abilities in the use of English as a first, second, third .... nth language, both in writing and when speaking.

Within this multilingual multicultural community I was always especially impressed by three groups:

The first, formed by (former West) Germans, were systematically able to write extremely good technical and administrative English. Most also spoke English very well, albeit with a characteristic accent (which you don't notice in print). All HQ staff were supposed to be fluent in English and French and the Germans made it a point of honor to respect this requirement, to the extent that many were equally good in both French and English.

The second group was composed of people from the former Yugoslavia - and noting that most of them were in the 35-50 year age range, Pavle's comment about 'not wasting time' certainly seems to have applied to them, despite the potential for disruption in their student years. I recall that material submitted in English by engineers from Slovenia, in particular, was well-nigh perfect, suggesting a crystal-clear understanding of the newly-independent country's economic objectives. A former chairman of the association's engineering committee was a native Serb - but his command of both English and French was second to none.

The third group was - the 'Brits'. Most of those with whom I had dealings had 'done time' at the best-known universities in the southern half of England - places where the Queen's English and BBC English are supposedly the norm. In most cases, their English texts were unuseable other than as rough notes serving as the basis for drafting a proper manuscript. Why? Because, despite their academic prowess in digital signal processing, optics or whatever, they lacked basic writing skills. They were utterly incapable of drafting a clear account of their project. Worse - as far as we were concerned - they could only write in idiom, often reproducing on paper what they might have spoken, frequently disjointed phrases intelligible only to fellow natives. They were the classic producers of learned articles that could only be understood by the author him/herself!

They were quite incapable of using plain English for the purposes of international communication, and didn't even understand the need to make the effort to have themselves understood by their 'foreign' peers - and we're talking here about educated people working for the country's leading purveyors of mass communication . The idea that by sharing knowledge they might create wealth for their company or for themselves apparently never crossed their minds. They were - and from what I read on the association's website today, they still are - living in cloud-cuckoo land, unaware that the world's mass media - and dozens of other global industries - are moving into the hands of a new breed of entrepreneur using international English to communicate freely and openly for the betterment of mankind, their companies - and, ultimately, themselves.

The fact is - whether English-speaking 'natives' like it or not - that Palev's vision is a growing reality in the real world, fostered by the needs of the global economy and quite unpurturbed by the hissing and booing from the upper circle of English purists.

Having spent 35 years in the international mass media industry, I am happy to reflect on my efforts to assist and even to encourage non-natives to use international English where it is appropriate, instead of allowing themselves to be cajoled into some kind of inferority complex by the parochial attitudes of English-language natives.

MediaMatrix

Balasubramaniam wrote:
On abolishing "natives"

"[The native language label] It implies that any native speaker has the required target-language writing ability, and any non-native does not. This is patently not the case."

Balasubramaniam L. wrote:

Here is one more extract from the earlier discussion on this topic (Born Again (and self-proclaimed) natives?)

It's difficult enough persuading clients that you are a native speaker of English if your name is Konstantin Kisin without the problems created by their negative experience of dealing with translators who have claimed to be natives in the past.

Lisa Simpson, MCIL wrote:
However, proficiency does not equate with being native.

A proficient speaker may make an infinitesimal number of mistakes but when they make them, they are still the mistakes that a native speaker would never make. That's not to say that native speakers don't make mistakes, of course not, but they are native mistakes.

Samuel Murray wrote:
for if non-native errors can be known, they surely can be taught not to commit.

Ty Kendall wrote:

Not necessarily. SLA research has shown that...

You can teach someone about common (non-native) errors till your eyeballs bleed, but cognitively they may not always be ready or able to eliminate them from their own output.

Balasubramaniam L. wrote:

Here is one more extract from the earlier discussion on this topic (Born Again (and self-proclaimed) natives?)

Samuel Murray wrote:
Since this thread has started I have read quite a lot more about SLA than I had previously done, and I got the distinct impression that a lot of SLA research relates to people who learn a second language from scratch, people who learn it in a teacher-learner context, people who don't use the second language as extensively as their main language, and people who do not work with that language at analytical level daily (i.e., they're not translators). So although I find SLA research articles of value to this debate, I'm also careful to apply all of it to skilled non-native translators.

Is this truly due to lack of ability, or could it be due to lack of effort?
Samuel

Ty Kendall wrote:



Another very long article. To summarize - it is basically saying that "because I once met a couple of natives who were crap then that must mean non-natives (in their droves) have a right to call themselves native".

Not to mention that the native speakers in question aren't translators. We've been over this flawed argument more than once....

and we've already dismissed that logic eons ago.

[Edited at 2012-09-12 09:51 GMT]