We all have bugaboos and afflictions as human beings. They tend to percolate into our unconscious, dashing our plans, messing with our standards, opening shutters and throttling cabinets in our tidy neuronal offices of the mind, and generally doing everything in their power to ruin a good night’s sleep. And too many times the notion mentioned in this article’s title—my long-time bugaboo—has been considered, asserted, broadly supported, and only faintly rebutted with a small minority of exceptions and edge cases. But it has never been ousted from its place as a general principle espoused by many players in the industry, cleaving to its status as the official stance of companies and agencies alike without seeming to crumble under its own weight. There are many ardent supporters of this assumption, and while many of them happen to be from translation agencies, there are still countless others out there in the wild, translators and professors and executives and project managers that have all the backing of orthodoxy: no one should translate into a language, it is assumed, in which they lack native-speaker status.
As a dogma that is all but unshakeable among behemoths in the industry, this assumption is based on a notion in the field of linguistics and second-language acquisition that has long been disputable and unsettled. The notion is simple enough: people are native speakers either by virtue of being born into the language or by that of acquiring the language before the end of the so-called critical period in language acquisition. Without a doubt, reality is more complicated than this binary division between native and nonnative speakers, underpinned by a hypothesis that establishes a deadline for the status of native speaker; assuming something derived from ideas that are themselves unsettled, moreover, is generally not good practice—unless, of course, there is a sufficient majority that makes it not only possible but acceptable with its tacit complicity. This is the first of three fallacies of the native-speaker assumption: native and nonnative speakers exist in a neat binary opposition.
The second fallacy is just a reasonable extension of the first to our own translation industry: translation happens in a written medium, whereas theories postulating the existence of the native speaker begin with the idea of a linguistic intuition that is innate, preceding the school-age development of writing skills. And while writing takes speaking as its point of departure, there are significant differences between the two media. So if we concede for a moment the first fallacy of the native-speaker assumption—that native speakers exist legitimately in the first place together with the critical period—this second fallacy supposes that speaking and writing are one and the same, that native-speaker intuition applies not only to speaking but to writing. And yet writing and speaking are not the same—many children never even learn to read until well into the second half of the critical period. Even more come to write with a finesse that can be attributed to a so-called native intuition only a posteriori, after many years of education that lasts through childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. By that point, enhanced by the artifice of those intervening years of education, native-speaker status as it relates to writing ability becomes all but tenuous.
So while writing and speaking have an obvious connection, they are far from identical, and it is illogical to apply native intuition to a medium in which education, authority, and the years-long elaboration of often counterintuitive rules are far more determinant than any possible intuition. That is the second fallacy.
Lastly, because translators have a unique perspective based on their first-hand experience of the complexity of translation as compared with that of writing alone—or speaking, for that matter—there is a third fallacy more familiar to the translator than to any other language professional. This fallacy can be expressed simply enough: translation is not just writing. Although writing in the target language is the most important skill of what could be considered a tripartite skill set for the translator—albeit even that apparent assumption could be disputed—it is still only one skill.
The other two, while not as critical to the overall appearance of the final product, are nonetheless important: one, reading comprehension in the original language—that of the source text—which comes with obvious advantages if this is the translator’s more proficient (dare I say native) language; and two, the actual process of transferring the meaning between the two languages, which underlies not only translation itself but the translator’s entry into the inner sanctum of the universe.
When added together, these phases could be said to constitute the complex process that is translation, and taking any of them in isolation is a recipe for a wrongheaded and disastrous conception of what translation is—and what it does, together with the results it can achieve. Translation agencies as well as companies ignore this composite skill set at their own peril; vetting translators based on nothing more than their status as native speakers of the target language is as reasonable as drafting a basketball player based on nothing more than height. The talent and ability and actual value (and the devil, of course) are in the details.
And yet the number of speakers capable of translating into their nonnative language is very small indeed, and the actual risks entailed by an agency’s accepting so-called nonnative translators is minimized if they exclude that possibility altogether. In this sense, many agencies and companies could be understood as pragmatists, simplifying the expensive process of vetting the skill set of potential translators by leaving out the unicorns and exceptions and getting the most potential reward for the least possible risk, whether that be financial or reputational. In an era of cost-cutting and technical efficiency, from the standpoint of an organization fighting for its life in a viciously competitive market, that strategy is difficult to blame—and as a translator, I have to confess my own special sympathy for the merciless rigors of capitalism.
None of this, of course, changes the fallacies of the assumption about translating only into a so-called native language. And yet I would assert that the industry-wide assumption about the native-speaker translator will not be going anywhere any time soon: changing a rule in response to these logical assertions about the nature of translation and native-speaker status to accommodate a minority of translators would be impractical. There are not enough excellent (so-called) nonnative translators to bring theory and practice into alignment throughout the industry—at least for the moment.
I find solace, at least, in demonstrating the fallacies of these ideas and pointing out their obvious theoretical limitations, even as I recognize their mercenary utility for some kinds of agencies and companies in some sectors of the market. But what about the translator who happens to be skillful in a nonnative direction? Given that the native-speaker assumption lacks even the most basic rational support as a general principle, the nonnative translator should have nothing to fear from being tempted into heterodoxy. If we are exceptions, we should proudly bear that designation. We should be warriors in the bloody battle of the industry, hopping and feinting here and there in the fray with our divinely rational sabers. So if you are an exception—one of the brave and seemingly ill-fated warriors doing the dance into a nonnative language—there is only one tactic available: to fight for your adopted countries and bring home the victory. And victory for you, at least in this industry—let that be understood the world over—is victory for us all.
