| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5 6 7] > | English: Who needs the natives? Thread poster: IanW (X)
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| | | It was the Celts who got highjacked | Jun 2, 2004 |
3) But just one small point about highjacking English, mentioned in this thread- as far as I know the history it wasn't exactly as if Indians (and many other peoples) came to England on some particularly dark and rainy night and stole English for their evil purposes
No it wasn't, but tak... See more
| | | | Hacene 
United Kingdom
Local time: 06:12
English to French
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| A last word from me for all the hard-working translators out-there | Jun 2, 2004 |
Firstly, to those who nicely answered my comment and informed me that I have missed the point completely, let me reassure you that I haven't. Considering that I cannot judge other people's attitude, I can only look at (and ponder on) my behaviour. Ever since I have been on Proz, I have treated everybody with the uttermost respect as we are, on principle, all professionals and if we happen to disagree on some point of translation, insofar as I am concerned, there is never anything personnal. As I... See more Firstly, to those who nicely answered my comment and informed me that I have missed the point completely, let me reassure you that I haven't. Considering that I cannot judge other people's attitude, I can only look at (and ponder on) my behaviour. Ever since I have been on Proz, I have treated everybody with the uttermost respect as we are, on principle, all professionals and if we happen to disagree on some point of translation, insofar as I am concerned, there is never anything personnal. As I said, when someone gives me a comment (neutral/disagree) I try to see the reason behind it and ask other people around me (in French or in English, which are the only languages I work in despite knowing a few others) to confirm or invalidate the comment. Sometimes, it may happen that the exchange becomes more Latin in temper than British in phlegm, but it is always resolved via discussion.
Contrary to Ruxi, I did not think that Ian wanted to start a war, but rather that he wanted to improve a situation which was getting out of hand in the Eng>Eng. On that aspect, I agree with him, native speakers should not flee their land. However, I wanted to point out that some non-natives are a good asset for the site.
Now, I would like to suggest that if someone's attitude and reactions to comments are not appropriate, then the moderators should be called in.
I want also to thank Gayle and all the moderators for the hard work they are doing on the site struggling to maintain the highest possible standards. However our jobs is to try to make their as smooth as possible by adherring to a strict code of conduct.
Furthermore, a great thank you to Robin and Gareth for their excellent and fair comments; and, regarless of the polemic stemming out of his comments, I have to agree with Mats' suggestion regarding telling what is wrong and providing reference to back up the argument. After all, we are educated professional with an academic background and we could all easily adher to these simple and logical rules which could easily be included in the rules.
This being said, I hope I have not offended anyone and if so, my apology, as it was not my intention. I am looking forward to see all of you around the Proz website exchanging knowledge and experience in a friendly manner.
Kind regards,
Hacène ▲ Collapse
| | | | langnet
Italy
Local time: 07:12
Italian to German
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| Easy English? | Jun 2, 2004 |
Ruxi wrote:
English is not a difficult language, at least the one we learn in schools. Grammar rules are only a few and besides you can hear it everywhere: films,music a.s.o, unlike other languages.
German is a very difficult language: difficult grammar with many forms of the verbs, long compound words a.s.o At least for us Romanian people, German is more difficult than English. I don't talk here about dialects of both languages.
Please excuse my butting in on this, I have been tracking this thread all day long. But I - as a NON-native speaker of English, but a German native speaker who *has* started learning English at school at the age of 10 - must strongly object here. It seems to me that your're not too "familiar" with the peculiarities of the English language. English is as difficult a language as German, Italian, French or Romanian or whatever there might be. The *lack* of *complex* - that is: "complicated" - grammar rules* as in German or the Romanic languages (which are, IMHO, "much easier to learn" than German - and English!) is widely compensated for by an extremely rich and articulate vocabulary and tens of thousands of phrasal verbs and a complex tense system accessible only to a native speaker in all their variances. Learning - bad - English is easy and you can get along fine with it, having a good or excellent command of it is extremely difficult if not impossible for a non-native, as it is with German or any other language. For example, the tense system in German, compared to English, is rather easy. In Italian, I found much less difficulty with the "passato prossimo", "passato remoto" and "imperfetto" than with the English tenses that "even" involve the gerundium. And the same goes for the prepositions. Prespriptive grammar rules might even be an advantage: you have just to study them thoroughly by heart. This of course, is perceived as "difficult". As in Latin, in German you have to study grammar rules, declensions, conjugations, the precise order of words in the main and subordinate clause. So what? Just study them by heart to be able to form an acceptable German sentence. And then, study "by heart" all the English phrasal verbs and expressions to be used appropiately in all different situations, non to speak of the correct use of tenses. I wouldn't dare to guess what language requires less effort or application...
Besides, German language has also another sort of letters unlike English (Gotik).
Excuse me, but this is "rubbish", "Gotik" (I presume you mean "Altdeutsche Schrift") has nothing to do with it. This is, wenn überhaupt, a font type. As my Granny wrote only "Sütterlin" which I was never able to decipher completely. She never was taught anything else at school (Latin script). This has, BTW, a strong historical background that I think I don't have to mention... Before, we normally wrote and still are writing in "Latin script".
Please get yourself informed about phonemes and graphemes. English is considered the Indoeuropean language that has the most quantity of phonemes and therefore a wide variety of graphemes, only that no "special characters" are used as in German, where we have ä,ö,ü to indicate "Zwischenvokale" and au, ei, eu for the diphtongs, "ß" for a sharp double ss, "ie" and "ih" for a long "i". Please don't tell me that English is easier to write because these special characters are not used. I had to take, in my school life, a lot of dictations both in German and English (as foreign language), and I made a lot of mistakes in German as well as in English...
It's not that easy as you're trying to depict it.
OK, "Ich habe fertig". Native Speakers: please excuse my English. I tried to do my very best
Claudia
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heikeb
Member (2003)
English to German
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| Probabilistic approach | Jun 4, 2004 |
Ian wrote: What puzzles me, however, is that the quality of the French and German monolingual sites is still as high as ever. If anyone else has an explanation for this, or any other thoughts on this matter, I’d be very interested to hear them.
Well, here's my attempt at an explanation:
English is probably the language with the most native and non-native speakers among ProZ members.
English-English questions, which are by far much more frequent than German-Germa... See more Ian wrote: What puzzles me, however, is that the quality of the French and German monolingual sites is still as high as ever. If anyone else has an explanation for this, or any other thoughts on this matter, I’d be very interested to hear them.
Well, here's my attempt at an explanation:
English is probably the language with the most native and non-native speakers among ProZ members.
English-English questions, which are by far much more frequent than German-German ones (and I assume that's true for other languages also), have therefore a much wider audience, among them a much higher percentage of non-native speakers than among other languages.
As a consequence, there's a higher potential for non-suitable answers by non-natives in English than in other languages.
Furthermore, a native speaker is likely to react more negatively towards a non-suitable answer made by a non-native than a comparable non-suitable answer made by another native speaker, particularly if some additional language problems are visible.
So, personally, I don't believe it has anything to do with one language being considered easier than another or that non-native English speakers are more likely than other non-natives to over-estimate their skills - there's just more of them and more opportunities to screw up. Percentage-wise, it might be pretty similar for other languages. I just have to look at some of the German translations/explanations offered by people who cannot write correct German, but offer German translations or even claim to be native speakers in their profiles.  ▲ Collapse
| | | | Ruxi
German to Romanian
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| For Claudia and Heike | Jun 4, 2004 |
Heike:
You are quite right.There are more English translators native-speakers and non-native, than for other languages.
I was trying to explain this and this why a discussion has started about which language is more easy.
Like I said no language is easy to learn, every language has its problems and ...its charm. It depends very much on people and their capabilities.Some people can only learn some language, some can not learn langages at all and some others are a realy talent le... See more Heike:
You are quite right.There are more English translators native-speakers and non-native, than for other languages.
I was trying to explain this and this why a discussion has started about which language is more easy.
Like I said no language is easy to learn, every language has its problems and ...its charm. It depends very much on people and their capabilities.Some people can only learn some language, some can not learn langages at all and some others are a realy talent learnig many.
It shows up in practice that many people learn and do it easy, English. It is indeed more easy, it is universal, heard in films, songs, cartoons, sport a.s.o It is like this and it cann't be changed.And it became a common, universal language for communication between people.History helped too.A long time ago, French was the most used language somehow, now it became a little old-fashioned, but it was the language of the nobility, of the high-society.
And now I come to Claudia:
I don't intend to offend any of the languages, but still it's true. There are languages which are easier and people who have different capabilities to learn them.
My good friend learned more languages: English, French, Spanish, Greek.As she had an opportunity she tried with German too. She didn't manage and stopped.Greek seemed to be easier for her than German.
Just to explain to you: English has only a few tenses for the verbs, only one gender for the nouns.Or may be we didn't received anything in our books? I found Toeffler test very easy, making it 80%, at school I was the best at foreign languages with the best notes. Still they tell me here that I don't know English and for a while they even succeded to convince me. In the first days on ProZ I became such a fear, that I almost couldn't write English anymore.
In German first difficulty (at least for me) are the genders. I can never make the difference bewteen male and neutral. I couldn't see the logic.
And Claudia: learning by heart is not learning, because you forget immediately if you don't understand what you learn and if you don't practice.
German language has his problems with the declinations ("diesen, diesem" a-s.o), with tenses, with compund words, compound verbs a.s.o. All these are difficult for a non-native.
I started to learn Italian: vocabulary is easy for me, it is very similar with my native language, but Grammar, all those tenses for the verbs.Still I managed to learn them except 3: passato prossimo, cong.imperf. and imperativo.They are very different and irregular.
In French there is the pronunciation and the accents which are difficult for non-natives.
Some other languages have special letters or signs (Russian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese a.s.o).
Still people learn one or the other being capable or/and attracted.I could never learn Japanese or Chinese with all respect.
At last, there is a fahion in languages too like in any other field and it also depends on economical and political reasons. Some languages are very important being spoken by the great powers in the world and everybody needs to know them.
In many countries it was a time when Russian was compulsory to be studied in schools and known. You know why. Now it is obsolete.In some countries Spanish is very loved because of the "telenovelas".
Finally English, French, German people do not have to learn any other foreign language, it is the others who need to contact them and so to learn their languages. Why should they learn Romanian, whom they don't need (yet!).Romanian people learn a lot of languages to go to the world, to communicate.
This was not the main subject of the thread but an explanation was necessary, because native Enlish speakers do not understand why there are so many non-native English translators, who have to survive, however they are.
It is all a matter of respect between people, in this thread.
Ruxi ▲ Collapse
| | | | Richard Benham
France
Local time: 07:12
German to English
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In memoriam | Not just wegen, either... | Jun 4, 2004 |
I am sure that many of us who have learned German at school will have been told that "wegen" takes the genitive. If we got this wrong in tests we would have almost invariably "lost a mark".
Then what do we find? We get to Germany and discover that lots of people - and I mean lots - are using it with the dative.
I remember, studying for the Grosse Deutsche Sprachdiplom at the Goethe-Institut in Berlin, using the expression "laut dieses Buches", and being corrected by the teacher, who wanted me to say "laut diesem Buch".
In response to my perplexed expression, she added: "Was Sie gesagt haben, ist völlig richtig, aber das kann man nicht sagen...".
[Edited at 2004-06-04 11:24]
| | | | LuciaC
United Kingdom
Local time: 06:12
English to Italian
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| Successful thread? | Jun 4, 2004 |
Ian, as of today this thread has hit over 2900 views. I was wondering if something is going to change in the English monolingual site, if the message got across. Please keep us posted!
Lucia
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| Learning the rules | Jun 4, 2004 |
I realise that this thread is a very well frequented one and that is why I felt impelled to post a note about the prohibition of the Welsh language (in formal situations) in 1536 (this not being reversed until 1993). Now in 2004 it is possible to study advocacy in the Welsh language.
However, to get back to the descriptive business, I have now unearthed some books written by academic linguists to back me up in what I was saying. The reason why prospective language teachers were requ... See more I realise that this thread is a very well frequented one and that is why I felt impelled to post a note about the prohibition of the Welsh language (in formal situations) in 1536 (this not being reversed until 1993). Now in 2004 it is possible to study advocacy in the Welsh language.
However, to get back to the descriptive business, I have now unearthed some books written by academic linguists to back me up in what I was saying. The reason why prospective language teachers were required to read these was presumably because the emphasis at the time was on teaching people to SPEAK (as opposed to merely writing) and we were being asked to appreciate that the spoken language is often very different.
To quote from David Crystal writing about "traditional approaches to language study" in "Linguistics":
"A language can be used at many levels of formality, and it should be one of the tasks of a linguistic description to take account of these differences, and not to select some levels as "right" and others as "wrong". For example, we are all familiar with the "rule" in English which tells us that we should use "whom" and not "who" as the relative pronoun in a sentence like - the man - you were talking to was a foreigner. But such rules simply distort the reality of English. It is not a question of whom being correct usage and who being incorrect: each is appropriate (a less loaded word than "correct") in certain circumstances and inappropriate in others. The difference is essentially one of formality.... It would be as inappropriate to introduce formality into an informal, chatty conversation, as it would be to introduce an informality on an official occasion.
This is yet another way in which traditional grammar gives a distorted view of the proportions and function of language forms. The grammar books imply that the language they describe is normal, general usage, whereas in fact it is frequently a specialized variety."
Then I looked at my Duden grammar and it does take a somewhat different approach, leaning more towards the prescriptive in that it describes what it calls the "Hochsprache", yet it is descriptive of this level of language as the following passage shows:
"Jeder Sprachzustand, den es zu beschreiben gilt, ist das Ergebnis einer historischen Entwicklung, das heißt, daß auch hier ältere und neuere Stufen übereinanderliegen......... Der Beschreiber ist in diesen Bewegungszonen in echter Not, weil er auf der einen Seite soviel Norm sichtbar machen möchte wie möglich, auf der anderen Seite der Sprache aber nichts abverlangen kann, was sie nicht enthält..............
.....bei allen Ausnahmefällen geht es mehr darum, sie zu klären, als sie durch "richtig" oder "falsch" zu erlauben oder zu verbieten. Die Sprachgemeinschaft wird durch Mehrheitsentscheid immer wieder dafür sorgen, daß Ausnahmen zu Regeln werden. ▲ Collapse
| | | | IanW (X)
Local time: 07:12
German to English
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TOPIC STARTER | A few final words | Jun 6, 2004 |
As it looks like everyone has said their piece, I’d just like to say that I am very pleased at the response to my posting. I find it particularly uplifting that practically all native speakers who contributed – who represent a wide cross-section of language pairings – appear to feel the same way about the issue in question.
Inevitably, if there are two ends to a stick, there will always be a few people who will grasp the wrong one – in spite of Marcus stepping in early on to... See more As it looks like everyone has said their piece, I’d just like to say that I am very pleased at the response to my posting. I find it particularly uplifting that practically all native speakers who contributed – who represent a wide cross-section of language pairings – appear to feel the same way about the issue in question.
Inevitably, if there are two ends to a stick, there will always be a few people who will grasp the wrong one – in spite of Marcus stepping in early on to clarify the issue. And a few who have a tendency to dive off at wild tangents (the “descriptive” vs. “prescriptive” issue deserves a separate posting in the Linguistics forum) and a few who jump lemming-like to ridiculous conclusions.
My thanks to all the natives and non-natives who contributed, particularly to Gareth for the Glaswegian lyricism and to Steffen Walter and his disappearing yellow octagons …
I sincerely hope that this posting will bring about a few long-overdue changes in the attitudes towards English native speakers on the site.
Irish greetings from Cologne
Ian ▲ Collapse
| | | | Daniel Jeory
Local time: 06:12
Member (2003)
German to English
Ian Winick wrote:
At the risk of opening up a can of worms,
...and what a can of worms it was...! Enough already...:)
| | | | Marijke Mayer
Netherlands
Local time: 07:12
Dutch to English
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| several 'native' languages | Jun 13, 2007 |
I am a firm believer in just having one 'N' icon next to one's name at ProZ. I am flabbergasted to see that some people have as much as 3 (!) of such 'native' icons. By allowing this, I believe it brings down the quality of this site; nobody can seriously believe that!
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RHELLER
United States
Local time: 23:12
French to English
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| Yes, it is possible to have more than one native language | Jun 13, 2007 |
I think that the quality of the individual translator and the quality of the website are 2 separate things.
There are some rare cases of individuals (I personally met 2 here on proz) who are native speakers of 2 languages. This usually happens when one moves as a child or has parents with 2 different native tongues.
If an agency has doubts, they should ask for a test or a sample. Those who are "pretending" will soon be found out - these things cannot be faked.
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Marijke Mayer wrote:
I am a firm believer in just having one 'N' icon next to one's name at ProZ. I am flabbergasted to see that some people have as much as 3 (!) of such 'native' icons. By allowing this, I believe it brings down the quality of this site; nobody can seriously believe that!
In my country we've got two native tongues. Moreover, it's in Constitution.
| | | | lexical
Spain
Local time: 07:12
Portuguese to English
| I'm sorry, Mats | Jun 26, 2007 |
...but we native speakers can indeed:
- say WHAT is wrong rather than THAT it is wrong
- provide examples
- provide references that everyone can check
and still be abused (yes, I do mean abused) by non-native speakers who think they know better. Like many translators I know, I've given up trying to contribute to the Portuguese > English Kudoz pair (which should really be called the Portuguese > Portuglish pair) because I feel I'm wasting my time against the tide of... See more ...but we native speakers can indeed:
- say WHAT is wrong rather than THAT it is wrong
- provide examples
- provide references that everyone can check
and still be abused (yes, I do mean abused) by non-native speakers who think they know better. Like many translators I know, I've given up trying to contribute to the Portuguese > English Kudoz pair (which should really be called the Portuguese > Portuglish pair) because I feel I'm wasting my time against the tide of inexpert non-native speakers who think they own the English language.
I agree with everything that Ian has said, but it is also true that this issue has been raised in these forums time and time again, without any result. I don't know what the solution is - maybe there isn't one - but it's for Henry and his lieutenants to sort that out. ▲ Collapse
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