| Páginas sobre el tema: < [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40] > | What is your definition of “native speaker” and why does it matter to you to have a definition? Autor de la hebra: Bernhard Sulzer
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| Perhaps a drift in the examples | Oct 15, 2014 |
Sharp and clear...
Jenn Mercer wrote:
As a reminder, the topics of this thread are:
1. The definition of a native speaker
As I said before (SEZ WHO?), there are three possible definitions:
a) Documental - Someone who has a birth certificate and early school records from a place where that language is spoken.
b) Witnessed - Someone who is taken for a local by most people in a place where that language is local.
c) Self-claimed - Someone whose upbringing (by parents?) was carried out in that language.
Jenn Mercer wrote:
2. Why that definition matters to you.
It doesn't matter to me at all.
It matters to some prospects who consider it a 'thoroughly effective' criterion to pick translators. I don't agree with them.
I translate both ways between English US and Portuguese BR.
I promised myself not to translate Italian, French, and Spanish; I only speak them for my personal use.
My matches are:
a) Documental - Definitely native Brazilian Portuguese, from Sao Paulo - SP.
b) Witnessed - Obviously the previous one, anywhere in Brazil. Also English, from Los Angeles, CA, as recognized in various places in the US, UK, and Canada.
c) Self-claimed - EN and PT, as required and examined by the Brazilian gov't to be licensed as a sworn translator. My parents spoke Polish, but I don't.
Is this what was expected?
| | | | | “Native speaker” – Wot’s that? | Oct 16, 2014 |
Definition: Anyone who implies, suggests, says, claims or purports - honestly, misguidedly, deceitfully or otherwise - to be such; often in the belief that self-promotion using the expression “native speaker of xyz” will enhance the said person’s personal, professional and/or business interests.
Why is that definition important to me? Because it serves as a constant reminder that “language nativeness” is utterly worthless as a gauge of translation proficie... See more Definition: Anyone who implies, suggests, says, claims or purports - honestly, misguidedly, deceitfully or otherwise - to be such; often in the belief that self-promotion using the expression “native speaker of xyz” will enhance the said person’s personal, professional and/or business interests.
Why is that definition important to me? Because it serves as a constant reminder that “language nativeness” is utterly worthless as a gauge of translation proficiency.
All that aside, how nice it is to see so many colleagues, friends – and a few newcomers – here for the latest proz.com “native language” shindig!
xxxMediaMatrix ▲ Collapse
| | | | Andy Watkinson 
España
Local time: 15:14
Miembro
catalán al inglés
+ ...
José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote: Sharp and clear... Jenn Mercer wrote:
As a reminder, the topics of this thread are:
1. The definition of a native speaker As I said before (SEZ WHO?), there are three possible definitions, etc....
José, no-one SEZ anything. Jenn was merely re-stating the aim of the discussion.
I thought that much was obvious.
No definition is being imposed; quite the contrary, read the title of the thread - you're being asked for your definition; no more, no less.
Jenn Mercer wrote:
2. Why that definition matters to you.
It matters to some prospects who consider it a 'thoroughly effective' criterion to pick translators. I don't agree with them.
No-one said it does, and neither do I, but what Bernhard asked for, some 380 posts ago, was how you define a native speaker - must be a tough question when it generates so much heat and so little light.
Cæterīs pāribus ring a bell. Anyone?
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Samuel Murray wrote: Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz wrote: Samuel Murray wrote: (... [doesn't seem to parse well]) That is a death sentence! {-: Is it because I'm a non-native writer, or because I was rambling a bit this time, or because I generally don't write much sense anyway?
My guess is that the system just wanted to punish you for nesting quotes so hard!
Andy Watkinson wrote:
Cæterīs pāribus ring a bell. Anyone?
You must be native to charmap.exe!
José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:
My parents spoke Polish, but I don't.
Simple. You're a native non-speaker.
Sarah Elizabeth wrote:
I know this from personal experience as a translator and from my experiences of non-native English speakers while an MA candidate at the University of Chicago and a doctoral candidate at Yale. The US State Department, ITI, CIOL and ATA all seem to agree (see my above post for direct links to this information on their websites).
Oh tell me more about how translators' associations are packed choke full of warm and tender feelings for non-native translators.
[Edited at 2014-10-16 03:16 GMT]
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Bernhard Sulzer
Estados Unidos
Local time: 09:14
inglés al alemán
+ ...
PERSONA QUE INICIÓ LA HEBRA | Regarding my definition | Oct 16, 2014 |
Samuel Murray wrote: Bernhard Sulzer wrote:
I believe the cultural background, years of acquiring and learning it in that language/cultural environment from childhood on constitute a unique way of acquisition that cannot be repeated later. I fully agree. And... it is one of the most obvious (and probably most common) ways of acquiring a native language.
To me it's the only way so far. Anything else is IMO just a different way of learning a language later on and you can try to assess proficiency but not nativeness or first-learned language (just a tentative term). Non-natives are arguably illiterate, fluent, literate, very literate, super proficient - but you are going to need benchmarks. If you were to add "near-native" to this group, it doesn't fit, I propose, because native describes a way of acquiring a language, not how proficient one is. Either you acquired it like a native speaker or not. Some might say, "near-native" goes more in the direction of how well one speaks it, but apples and oranges, you know. I suggest proficiency does come into play with regard to the terms"native speaker" or "native language" or "native speech" or whatever fits that concept, but it only comes into play when a translator or other language expert calls himself/herself a native speaker or some such.
Bernhard Sulzer wrote:So I would not accept at any time that someone who doesn't fit that definition calls himself/herself a "native" speaker...
Samuel Murray wrote:
And this is why it is important for someone such as yourself to know what other people mean when they say "native language".
Other people won't change their definition simply because you disagree with it, but if it is important for you to know with certainty whether you can "accept" their native language claim, then the best way to accomplish that is for everyone to make it clear why they believe their claimed native language is their native language.
I am not stuck on my definition if you convince me otherwise. Not trying to be stubborn. Anyone can disagree with me too.
Bernhard Sulzer wrote... and the term "native" seems to support that understanding.
Samuel Murray wrote:
Look, I'm sure you agree that while the term "native language" is an English language term, it refers to a concept that is not restricted to the culture of English-speaking people. Right?
Right.
Samuel Murray wrote:
Still, "native language" is an English term, and we should interpret it using English language rules. In English, a single concept can be denoted by a pair of words that may originally have had something to do with the original concept. However, over time, multi-word terms in the English language can come to mean something that is not necessarily directly related to the individual words that make up the term.
Take "barn dancing" and "ballroom dancing" as examples. A barn dance or a ballroom dance was originally a dance in a barn or in a ballroom, but these days the terms are not used for dances that happen only in barns and ballrooms. The most accurate description of "barn dancing" has very little to do with a barn:
A barn dance is any kind of dance involving traditional or folk music with traditional dancing, held ... in any suitable building. ... The term “barn dance” is usually associated with family-oriented or community-oriented events, usually for people who do not normally dance, [and] will, therefore, generally use easy dances so that everyone can join in. (Wikipedia, "barn dance")...
So too, there is no compulsion to define the term "native language" in terms of the usual meaning of the word "native".
There's no compulsion, right. But "native" or anything similar expressing the concept as I understand it is related to the way the original language (the first-after-birth language). I am not convinced you can take that dance out of the real ballroom.
Samuel Murray wrote:
As translators (who deal with meaning, not words) we should really reject any definition of the term "native language" that relies too strongly on the definition of the word "native".
I would agree it doesn't necessarily have to mean "by happenstance of your birth" so to speak, or the first language you learned from 0-5. It could also be (in addition) the language you learned from 5 on. But it would have to be from childhood on for me.
So far, I am clinging to my understanding of native language or any similar term that can convey that concept. People can of course disagree.
[Edited at 2014-10-16 03:22 GMT]
| | | | Balasubramaniam L.
India
Local time: 18:44
Miembro 2006
inglés al hindi
+ ...
LOCALIZADOR DEL SITIO | The world is more complex than that | Oct 16, 2014 |
Sarah Elizabeth wrote:
In the context of professional translation, "native speaker" is meaningful to me if it indicates someone who grew up and was educated in the target language country up through university or equivalent, meaning with university-level (or equivalent) skills, as a minimum. (And when I talk about "university level skills", I am talking about the American education system -- which is why I am also including "or equivalent".) But if it just means "someone who grew up and was educated in the target language country", with no reference to education level (or equivalent), it would be meaningless to me in the context of professional translation, because it would not indicate anything to me about a person's skills for dealing with and producing texts.
The Panchatantra example of six blind men trying to define an elephant is a very apt one here, as native means different things to many of us here.
But coming to your own definition quoted above, I have some problems with the term "target language country" used in it. In most cases, the geographical spread of countries (or even regions within countries, such as states or provinces) never matches exactly with the geographical spread of languages. It would be oversimplification to think it does. So you always (or often) have geographical regions (such as at the borders of states or countries) where two languages coexist.
This is evident for people like me from India where language is said to change every mile you travel in any direction (here language includes dialect), but may not be so obvious to monolingual countries, such as the US or many countries of Europe. This therefore needs stressing here.
Also, the language-region concept does not apply to global languages like English. Would you consider India to be a target language country of English? Arguments for both sides of the answer to this question are possible and both would be wrong as well as right. In India, due to the colonial experience, English is still widely used in administration, the judiciary, higher education, media and business. But it is no where spoken or used as a native language, except amongst a very minisicule section of the population (ranging from 1 to 10 per cent according to different estimates). Yet, most of the higher education in India happens in English, and it is widely used in business. So it is quite a common experience here to find someone for whom English is not a native language, but it is the language in which he has received all his education, sometimes from the kintergarten to the highest educational levels, but mostly at least his higher education. Also English is the language he habitually uses in his day to day official work, but not in his social work. Many such persons acquire proficiency in English that is superior to that of an average native English person.
So here you have a case where a person has native proficiency in a language (English) without going through the usual process of childhood immersion and living in an environment where the language is spoken.
I am sure the case also applies to other global languages.
This is why any definition of native language based on a geographical region does not fit the facts observed.
Also, at the end of the day, what matters to an outsourcer is the proficiency you have acquired in your target language, not where you come from and how you acquired that proficiency.
Now a translator who accidentally happens to be residing in the geographical region of hislanguage would want to claim that this is a critical requirement of language proficiency, but their real intention clearly is to market a unique feature he has as an essential and exclusionary feature in translator selection.
I think we should not fall into this trap, it won't be good for the translation industry, especially in a globalizing world where more and more people are going to be moving away from the region of their language in search of employment, higher studies and business opportunities.
As I had said in one of my earlier post, I would therefore be quite satisfied if we make a clear choice between these two options:
1. Define native language as birth-oriented, but make it clear that in this definition native language emphatically does not indicate proficiency in the language. It is merely a statement of fact like the colour of your eyes is black or your height is 5 feet 6 inches.
Or
2. If you want to use native language as a yardstick of proficiency, define it with a lot of other attributes that also contribute to language proficiency.
I think, the former approach would be the easier one to adopt. And if we adopt this option, we should simply drop native language from the translator selection process and leave it to the outsourcers to come up with other ways to judge the suitability or proficiency of translators.
| | | | Bernhard Sulzer
Estados Unidos
Local time: 09:14
inglés al alemán
+ ...
PERSONA QUE INICIÓ LA HEBRA
deleted
[Edited at 2014-10-16 20:55 GMT]
| | | | Balasubramaniam L.
India
Local time: 18:44
Miembro 2006
inglés al hindi
+ ...
LOCALIZADOR DEL SITIO | You would be surprised, but you could indeed be one | Oct 16, 2014 |
Andy Watkinson wrote:
And to top it all, it now turns out that I'm some sort of freak because I was actually born into a family in which we spoke only one language; all my friends spoke the same one; same story at school, on TV, on the street..etc.... at school, University, strange isn't it. Suppose I'm in danger of extinction.
I am sure you meant this tongue-in-cheek or as sarcasm, but you may have said a profound truth. Monolingual cultures are indeed on the path to extinction if global trends are any indication.
The kind of monolingual you define had a distinct historical background - the warring nation-states of Europe based on one language, which was ruthlessly imposed on the population by mass education in a single dialect. You are a product of that authoritarianism. Fortunately, most parts of the world are reverting to multilingualism and multiculturalism where there is a more natural intermingling of languages and cultures unfettered by artificially created and imposed borders.
My prediction is that in places like Europe which have done away with national borders and have allowed free flow of people, in a few decades you will have a situation like India where people naturally speak many languages and easily switch between languages.
The relevance to this topic is that the concept of native language is a throw-back from a specific historical past which is quite irrelevant to modern world conditions.
Sometimes ideas outlive the specific situations in which they emerged and for which they were relevant, and native language seems to be an exemplary example of such ideas.
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jyuan_us
Estados Unidos
Local time: 09:14
Miembro 2005
inglés al chino
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| I think the OP did believe a definition matters to everybody | Oct 16, 2014 |
Andy Watkinson wrote: Jenn Mercer wrote:
2. Why that definition matters to you.
It matters to some prospects who consider it a 'thoroughly effective' criterion to pick translators. I don't agree with them.
No-one said it does, and neither do I, but what Bernhard asked for, some 380 posts ago, was how you define a native speaker - must be a tough question when it generates so much heat and so little light. Cæterīs pāribus ring a bell. Anyone?
If not, he should have written "Does that definition matter to you?" other than "Why that definition matters to you."
| | | | jyuan_us
Estados Unidos
Local time: 09:14
Miembro 2005
inglés al chino
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| Relying on a definition as a criterion? | Oct 16, 2014 |
I don't know who wrote the sentence quoted below"
It matters to some prospects who consider it a 'thoroughly effective' criterion to pick translators. I don't agree with them.
When a prospect is looking for someone native in language X to translate a file from English to language X, you may apply if you believe yourself to be native in language X. I don't think the prospect will evaluate you against any definition of negativeness to figure out if you are truly native in language X. Such an effort is neither meaningful or practical.
[Edited at 2014-10-16 04:22 GMT]
[Edited at 2014-10-16 05:40 GMT]
| | | | Bernhard Sulzer
Estados Unidos
Local time: 09:14
inglés al alemán
+ ...
PERSONA QUE INICIÓ LA HEBRA | Regarding current significance | Oct 16, 2014 |
Balasubramaniam L. wrote:
The relevance to this topic is that the concept of native language is a throw-back from a specific historical past which is quite irrelevant to modern world conditions.
Sometimes ideas outlive the specific situations in which they emerged and for which they were relevant, and native language seems to be an exemplary example of such ideas.
I hold that the concept of native language is not a throw-back from a specific historical past which is quite irrelevant to modern world conditions. I believe you have defined the concept yourself earlier, but you added proficiency aspects to your definition; I hope I remember correctly that you agreed on early language acquisition in an environment that uses that language all around during childhood as one important part of that definition; I would hope you could agree that this way of acquiring your native language(s) was important when people first learned to speak and some time later write and that it is still important today when we talk about native language (or first-learned or originally learned language(s)) - tentative terms if "native" seems too restrictive, old-fashioned, etc.
I hold that the idea of language acquisition from early childhood in the culture of that language is today still a valid component of the native language/speaker/writer concept. But we can agree to disagree.
By the way, when do you/did YOU start to learn English in India? Would you ever regard it as your native language even if it is a particular variation of English? But as you said, it's not used in social settings much, especially during childhood and seems to be a language reserved for certain purposes only.
[Edited at 2014-10-16 04:35 GMT]
[Edited at 2014-10-16 20:16 GMT]
| | | | Bernhard Sulzer
Estados Unidos
Local time: 09:14
inglés al alemán
+ ...
PERSONA QUE INICIÓ LA HEBRA | Regarding my second question | Oct 16, 2014 |
jyuan_us wrote:
I think the OP did believe a definition matters to everybody
...
If not, he should have written "Does that definition matter to you?" other than "Why that definition matters to you."
Hello jyuan_us,
What is your definition of “native speaker” and why does it matter to you to have a definition?
If someone has a definition, I think they might also have an explanation as to why it matters to them to have a definition (as in [for] this profession).
Even if it doesn't matter to you to have a definition, I would still like to hear your definition if you have one.
If you don't have one, that's of course fine too.
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Michele Fauble
Estados Unidos
Local time: 06:14
Miembro 2006
noruego al inglés
+ ...
| Native language and proficiency | Oct 16, 2014 |
Bernhard Sulzer wrote:
... native describes a way of acquiring a language, not how proficient one is. Either you acquired it like a native speaker or not. Some might say, "near-native" goes more in the direction of how well one speaks it, but apples and oranges, you know.
Are you saying that native language has no relationship to proficiency?
| | | | jyuan_us
Estados Unidos
Local time: 09:14
Miembro 2005
inglés al chino
+ ...
| Being native in a language doesn't mean proficiency in that language, especially in terms of writing | Oct 16, 2014 |
Michele Fauble wrote: Bernhard Sulzer wrote:
... native describes a way of acquiring a language, not how proficient one is. Either you acquired it like a native speaker or not. Some might say, "near-native" goes more in the direction of how well one speaks it, but apples and oranges, you know.
Are you saying that native language has no relationship to proficiency?
I have seen too many people in my native language (Chinese) write very poorly in Chinese.
| | | | Michele Fauble
Estados Unidos
Local time: 06:14
Miembro 2006
noruego al inglés
+ ...
| Native language and literacy | Oct 16, 2014 |
jyuan_us wrote: Michele Fauble wrote: Bernhard Sulzer wrote:
... native describes a way of acquiring a language, not how proficient one is. Either you acquired it like a native speaker or not. Some might say, "near-native" goes more in the direction of how well one speaks it, but apples and oranges, you know.
Are you saying that native language has no relationship to proficiency? I have seen too many people in my native language (Chinese) write very poorly in Chinese.
The vast majority of native speakers throughout the history of the human species have been illiterate. Good writing, spelling and punctuation are learned at school and are not relevant to native speaker status.
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