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On the Native Speaker

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By Maeva Cifuentes

It is a widely held belief in the translation industry that one should exclusively translate into their ‘native’ language. Most clients request only native-speaker translators and will not even consider non-native speakers. But what is a native language?

Most people say it is the language one has learned from birth, the language one speaks the best. If there is more than one language spoken at home, that person is often considered bilingual. This definition, however, doesn’t fit all circumstances. For example, with a Colombian father and a French mother, my first two languages (Spanish and French, respectively) were not the same as what I now consider my native language. Though I spoke only French and Spanish until I started schooling at the age of five, I am now most competent and fluent when using English, and for the most part I think in English. When speaking French or Spanish, I have an accent, and though I’ve been told it’s hard to place, it is clear that I’ve picked it up from the region I grew up in. Where does that place me as a ‘native speaker’?

I have come across a generous variety of bilinguals of different levels, ‘native’ speakers, near-native speakers and the like. For instance, my father grew up in Colombia, but moved to the United States at the ripe age of 17, and has been speaking English ever since. Despite not having learned English in his early childhood, as the ‘native speaker’ definition requires, he is far more bilingual than I and virtually has no accent nor makes any non-native errors when using English. I once knew a woman from Slovakia who had been living in the UK for over ten years. After having spent some time in Spain and having learned Spanish, she chose to translate from Spanish into English. As most professional translators might, I initially had a poor response to her choice – she committed the ultimate translator taboo. I asked her why she decided to dismiss her supposedly ‘native’ language of Slovak, and she simply told me that she had learned English the ‘correct’ way, and that her Slovak, despite being her first language, was rusty and probably not as good as her English. There are a plethora of further anecdotes I could provide. A person’s relationship with the language(s) she speaks is like her DNA – a complex and unique network of experience.

Accordingly, native speaking proficiency falls under a spectrum, not a black or white schema. In fact, there are many aspects that can define what a native speaker is aside from what was spoken at home during early childhood. A native speaker, for example, will never “get frustrated because they cannot encode their ideas” (Davies, 2003). The native speaker notices when a sentence is poorly structured, or when a subtle oddity has been made, even if they can’t say why it is so. “They know what the language is (‘Yes, you can say that’) and what the language isn’t (‘No, that’s not English…’)” (Ibid, 2003). “The Native Speaker: An Achievable Model?”, published by the Asian EFL Journal, defines six criteria for being a native speaker, five of which I agree with:

  1. The individual acquired the language in early childhood
  2. The individual has intuitive knowledge of the language
  3. The individual is able to produce fluent, spontaneous discourse
  4. The individual is competent in communication
  5. The individual identifies with or is identified by a language community
  6. The individual does have a dialect accent (include official dialect)

Obviously the first criteria is the one I disagree with. As seen in some examples above, a native-level speaker does not need to have acquired the language in early childhood. Maybe early adulthood at least, but there are too many factors playing in learning and knowing a language fluently. Furthermore, for translation purposes, it may make more sense to have rare language pairs (such as Flemish into French, a Flemish-speaking Belgian person being far more likely to have some knowledge of French than vice-versa) translated by a near-native speaker and proofread by a native speaker of the language. The terms mother language, mother tongue, etcetera, imply that the language you speak best is what was spoken to you by your parents when you were at the ‘critical age’ of language development. But we see now that this is not necessarily true. ‘Native-level’ proficiency can be found at many levels and through many means. What clients really want is a finished text that reads like it was originally written in the target language – so finally, does it matter through which means we learned it?

Davies, A. (2003). The native speaker: Myth and reality. London: Cromwell Press Ltd.

Lee, Joseph. «The Native Speaker: An Achievable Model?». Asian EFL Journal 7 (2).

 

 

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