| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5 6 7] | Add "degree of nativeness" to the native language search Thread poster: Samuel Murray
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Samuel Murray 
Netherlands
Local time: 11:39
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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TOPIC STARTER | Agree with Lisa | Jan 10, 2014 |
Lisa Simpson, MCIL wrote:
The reason this thread was started at all was as an offshoot of a jumbo discussion that took place last summer.
Yes, you have to view the original suggestion in the light of what the suggestion is for.
If you want to download the entire thread as a single file, you can do it, using this script of mine that I wrote specifically for that thread (also useful for other long threads that you want to read):
http://leuce.com/autoit/prozthreaddownloader.zip
Added: I just tested it, and the script still works. The original thread was 183 pages long, and the merged HTML file that contains the entire conversation is 16 MB large (plus about 700 KB for the images, if you open the file in your browser in "online" mode).
Samuel
[Edited at 2014-01-10 11:02 GMT]
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Phil Hand wrote:
This is correct, of course. But it's not a simple black/white issue. It is not the case that nativeness is not the same as proficiency, therefore nativeness is unrelated to proficiency. The relationship between nativeness and proficiency is a subtle one.
'Subtle' is probably the right word to call it. On the other hand, you could just say there's a lot of variables and overlaps here. People aren't all uniform across the board. Some have a limited reach but are flawless in what they can actually do. Others have an intellect sans frontières but are more erratic and less robust. Fluency, ease, intuition, correctness, good style, can all walk together or separately and will typically stand on different levels and make the particular writer or translator or whoever else it is unique and distinct from other users of the same language.
First, the number of non-natives who achieve the level of linguistic control required to be a translator is tiny. We are not just workers in our native language, we are *professional writers* in our target languages. Unless you're Beckett or Nabokov, you're just not that good in a non-native language.
True, but most native writers aren't that good after all. I'm talking about all those people who write articles, news pieces, advice, reports, marketing materials and so on, generally having some level of higher education or at the very least left the education system as adults. Often, published fiction writers, journalists and such like are just as good as their proofreader. It's probably not uncommon for powerful storytellers to be somewhat clueless about punctuation and even the kind of grammar that's taught, or used to be taught, to early teens.
Mind you, I'm not talking only about English here. I work in both directions between Polish and English, and the source texts tend to show about the same flaws. Stuff I just read and not translate tends to suffer from the same affliction. People can't handle sentence logic. Most native speakers, including university graduates, can't handle complex sentences too well, can't get their tenses right and so on. Grammatical forms are misused. Syntax follows weird patterns (if it follows any at all), spelling isn't perfect. Style probably doesn't deserve its name.
Problems: I can't necessarily control perfectly for tone and register in the way that a native can; I can't innovate in Chinese in the way that a native can. It takes me much longer to achieve quality Chinese output than it does a Chinese native. And I cannot act as my own quality control in Chinese, in the way that I can in English. As such, my Chinese is always a subset of Chinese: that part of Chinese that I've learned and can check.
Phil, natives can't control their tone and register perfectly. They're even typically somewhat lousy at it, at least as far as Polish and English go, including university graduates and peven professional linguists. They typically won't say or write anything 'non-native' (which seems to be the single biggest sin in modern linguistics, unlike generic bad grammar and lousy syntax), but even that is not guaranteed. I can tell you because non-native speakers of Polish basically don't exist, so the culprit has a 99% chance of actually being a Pole (although this has been changing lately).
It's not impossible to translate into L2 - I've certainly done it - but it's harder, takes longer, and requires more checking. Therefore it's not *best practice*. That's not to say it should never happen - subject knowledge could be a more important consideration for a specific job. But *all other things being equal* it makes sense to use a target native translator.
Well, then there's the issue of native comprehension, which modern linguistics and translation scene pretends does not exist. On the one hand, a non-native rarely gets to the stage of being a reliable writer, but on the other hand a non-native rarely fully understands everything that source text says and how it says it and why, either. Native speakers hit enough of a wall understanding complex stuff in their own languages as it is. TBH I don't even trust Master's holders in language studies to understand correct complex sentences written in their own language these days. This is probably due to the phasing out of grammar and syntax from early years of education.
Secondly, the question of proficiency is actually congingent on the concept of nativeness. A proficient writer in German is one who writes in a way that native Germans find easy to understand.
It's more than that, correctness and style also matter. The reader's passive competence in his own language also does. Most native speakers aren't actually as competent grammarians as a non-native is capable of becoming after a decade or so of heavy-duty learning.
There are many English speakers who are not native English speakers, and we rightly recognise them as such based on their proficiency.
Are you always right, though, when you recognise a non-native speaker based on his proficiency? And do you always recognise one on the basis of his overall proficiency rather than occasional tell-tale sign of a foreigner who must be thinking differently?
There are far more non-native speakers of English than there are natives, so poor writers have a very good chance of being non-native, but I've seen Polish so bad that I'd brand it as non-native in a heartbeat if it were English... except that, like I said, non-native speakers of Polish generally don't exist, so dude has a 99% chance of really being a Pole and another good one of being a Pole with a degree.
Certain kinds of proficiency are an easy and accurate indicator of whether a person is *not native* - though they cannot tell you whether a person *is native* or a highly proficient speaker of L2.
There are also certain kinds of errors which make you almost sure the writer is a native speaker of the language.
Lisa Simpson, MCIL wrote:
I don’t see these heated discussions taking place in the forums of professional translators’ associations, which are still by and large made up of people who are first and foremost linguists.
When it comes to legal translation, people who are first and foremost linguists struggle with grammar, syntax and the register first and foremost, rather than legal terminology.
[Edited at 2014-01-13 08:21 GMT]
| | | | Lincoln Hui
Hong Kong
Local time: 17:39
Member
Chinese to English
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| What's a linguistic background? | Jan 13, 2014 |
who have come to this profession from a linguistic background
What's a "linguistic background"?
| | | | | Philology, applied linguistics, translation studies etc. | Jan 13, 2014 |
Lincoln Hui wrote: who have come to this profession from a linguistic background What's a "linguistic background"?
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Lincoln Hui
Hong Kong
Local time: 17:39
Member
Chinese to English
+ ...
| Disconnect with reality? | Jan 13, 2014 |
Well, I don't come from such a background. I started working well before I started studying translation studies. But neither am I a "subject specialist", per se.
[Edited at 2014-01-13 09:18 GMT]
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