| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13] > | From bad to worse... An advice? Native vs Non-native issue Thread poster: Inga Petkelyte
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Lincoln Hui 
Hong Kong
Local time: 12:58
Member
Chinese to English
+ ...
| Cry me a river | Aug 15, 2015 |
Ty Kendall wrote: Lincoln Hui wrote:
my chief beef with those imbeciles....unlike the government clearance scenario that some nincompoop used as analogy. Remind me, which charm school did you go to? *Ahem* http://www.proz.com/siterules/general/2#2
Sure, because it's ok to call people liars, but not ok to call a rose a rose. Respect is reserved for those who show them.
But then I should hardly be surprised. Double standards are the order of the day for some among us.
[Edited at 2015-08-15 21:10 GMT]
| | | | James Heppe-Smith
Türkiye
Local time: 07:58
German to English
Moderator of this forum | Play fair please | Aug 15, 2015 |
All,
As a new moderator, and a relatively recent Proz member, I have read this thread with interest.
However, in my opinion, the thread is meandering away somewhat from the original poster's topic.
Please do remember general rule no. 2 - http://www.proz.com/siterules/general/2#2 and match your responses accordingly.
Thank you.
| | | | Phil Hand
China
Local time: 12:58
Chinese to English
Lincoln Hui wrote:
As is the natural response to such requirements, non? Why not argue that these clients and agencies are promoting what you perceive to be dishonest behavior?
Sorry, I had misunderstood this quote. Misunderstood it because it's pretty messed up. You think that requiring a certain qualification for a job=promoting lying about that qualification? That's just...stupid. Cynical, too, but dumb-cynical, not smart-cynical. Standards exist for a reason. What you're saying there is the equivalent of "laws against stealing promote law-breaking".
Who's called you a liar? If you are saying that in fact, you know that English is not one of your native languages, but you claim on your profile that it is, then yeah, you're lying on your profile, and it would be neither incorrect nor rude of me or anyone else to point that out. Surely you'll concede that "lying" is well enough defined to handle that one? But as you pointed out, no-one cares about you and your profile. Now it just sounds like you're on a nitpicking campaign out of simple self-interest.
James - sorry, much of the meandering was my fault. My answer to the original question was, Inga should not bother trying to persuade clients who have a fixed requirement for target-native translators.
| | | | Lincoln Hui
Hong Kong
Local time: 12:58
Member
Chinese to English
+ ...
| Skulls thicker than rock layers | Aug 16, 2015 |
Phil Hand wrote:
What you're saying there is the equivalent of "laws against stealing promote law-breaking".
That is actually not an unheard-of argument, as anyone familiar with 1920s American history can attest.
Who's called you a liar?
Blanket statements on morality married to fuzzy and absurd definitions of the morally correct are going to have widespread collateral damage, and one must be quite naive and foolish to not expect a caustic response.
If you are saying that in fact, you know that English is not one of your native languages, but you claim on your profile that it is, then yeah, you're lying on your profile, and it would be neither incorrect nor rude of me or anyone else to point that out.
It's not incorrect or rude, it's just really stupid because you can't even agree on what truth is. Is someone born to German parents and grew up speaking nothing but English in school lying when they claim English as their native language rather than German? Well it won't be incorrect or rude for me to say that they are bleepin' liars, apparently.
Too often I have resisted the temptation to stir the waters by making the claim that those who grew up monolinguals are by nature inferior translators, not only because of their inferior language proficiency compared to those who grew up as multilinguals, but also because the inferior stimulation during the stage of growth results in a defective intellect. This is at least no more absurd than the notions on nativeness that some of us seem to legitimately believe in, and unlike many of these notions has the advantage of being impossible to disprove empirically. It would amuse me to no end what kind of response this would elicit.
Surely you'll concede that "lying" is well enough defined to handle that one?
If only it were. I am talking precisely about the absurdity that these people can't even agree on what truth is before accusing people of lying.
[Edited at 2015-08-16 02:19 GMT]
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Balasubramaniam L.
India
Local time: 10:28
Member (2006)
English to Hindi
+ ...
SITE LOCALIZER | Observations | Aug 16, 2015 |
Dan Lucas wrote:
The point is that agencies want to spend as little time (i.e. cost) as possible on finding talent. Any reduction in time spent recruiting translators - an effort that seems to be ongoing for most agencies - means more time for marketing to or dealing directly with clients. Time, in that sense, really is money.
It would be illogical for a high-quality agency to sift through 100 non-native speaker translators if experience tells them that, say, only 5 such non-natives will have target language skills of a high enough quality to meet the PM's standards. That's a hit ratio of 5%. (Note that the argument is not that such highly skilled people don't exist, simply that they make up a tiny percentage of the total.)
The PM could instead look at 100 native speaker translators and instead find (let's say) 25 translators that meet the agency's target language standards. That dramatically improved hit ratio of 25% implies a far better return on time invested. All other things being equal, it means that the agency will be able to recoup the cost of finding that talent five times more quickly if it restricts its search to native speakers.
Your argument would only make sense if the hit ratio for non-native speakers and native speakers were similar.
Like in the software industry, in translation too, the real worth of agencies rests on the quality of the freelance translators they work with. This is why sensible agencies spent enormous effort on translator selection. Agencies are only as good as the translators they have. Therefore, agencies don't do translator selection in a hurried manner, nor do they want to do it in minimum time, by just going through the motions. However, because all this is currently based on wrong premises about native language, all this effort comes to nothing, or yields sub-optimum results. By limiting the selection process to just natives, they are potentially depriving themselves of better translators who could have enhanced the quality of their pool of translators.
I don't think agencies, or any employer, would be too worried about having to deal with a large number of applications for job positions. It is normal in job selection procedure. In places like India, you get hundreds of thousands of applications for a few hundred seats in top colleges or for jobs. You arrive at the right candidate by carefully sifting through them using scientific principles to pick out the best candidate from all the applicants. It is counter-productive and foolish to keep this process simple by excluding arbitrarily a large section of the potentials by applying a superstition as a limiting factor.
The right approach would be to evolve a scientific method of selection that is geared to sifting quickly and efficiently through a large number of applications and zeroing in on the desirable ones.
The native language criterion clearly cannot be a substitute for this process, as we all know that not all natives develop full proficiency over their native language, and many target-native translators have poor competency in their source languages, particularly the English natives.
Also it is oversimplification to believe that translation begins and ends with native language. The truth is it has many other critical aspects such as source and target language competency, experience, educational background, specialization, location of translator, location of client, and a host of other factors. All these need to be considered in equal measure.
If we continue to condone the substitution of native language as a stand-in for such a complex and nuanced approach to translator selection, then agencies will never invest in developing such a process, and the whole profession, including the agencies themselves will suffer. Then no amount of marketing push will enable them to provide quality translation as their selection process would have ensured that they have ended up with a sub-par pool of translators.
Therefore, it is not at all illogical for agencies to sift through hundreds of applications, as it would be the hall-mark of "high-quality" agencies. Such agencies could in fact advertise it and make it their selling point that they don't subscribe to the outdated notion of native language, and cast a broader net and therefore their pool of translators is superior to that of their competitors! In a landscape that is choke-full of decadent agencies claiming that they work only with natives, this would indeed be a differentiator! Of course, this would work only so long as other agencies, too, don't jump onto this bandwagon! And I would welcome such a day!
Dan Lucas wrote:
Experience and common sense should tell us that the hit ratios are not remotely comparable.
The problem with common sense and experience is that they can sometime mislead. And the life cycle of common sense actually ends in superstition.
The reason why this is so is that they are both based on the past, on what has happened already, and do not adequately take into account the possibilities of the future or even of current developments, or of the opening up of new opportunities.
The translation profession has seen an explosion in the last few decades, which was largely set off by the coming of the internet. Before that translator and client personally met and exchanged typewritten documents, and both lived within a radius of a few kilometres. This area of a few square kilometres was inhabited by monolingual people, some of whom had felicity in another language and became translators. In such a scenario, most translators would be target-natives. The notion (or superstition in current situation) that only natives produce best translations is based on this experience, which has crystallized into the common sense you mention.
Today, thanks to the internet, thousands of miles separate translator and client. They come from different geographical, national, cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds. The explosion of population, the ease of travel, the extensive migration of millions of people from one part of the globe to the other, the merging of borders (as in Europe), and the emergence of multi-national corporations (our main clients) mean that the world is no longer what it was a few decades ago, both culturally and linguistically.
Even within the few square kilometres of area I mentioned earlier, it is now possible to find speakers of other languages, and people of other cultures.
But experience and common sense have not kept up with these momentous changes. That is how common sense fossilizes into superstition. When a common sense no longer applies to a changed situation, it is nothing but a superstition.
Instead of clutching on to these common sensical superstitions, agencies, as well as us, need to move with the times.
We always bemoan that our profession never gets the respect that other professions like that of doctors or lawyers or dentists get. Unless we change outmoded practices and working modes, we will never gain such respect and continue to wallow about as pseudo-professionals relying on superstitions and "common sense" and not on scientific principles.
[Edited at 2015-08-16 05:48 GMT]
| | | | Balasubramaniam L.
India
Local time: 10:28
Member (2006)
English to Hindi
+ ...
SITE LOCALIZER | Countering superstition | Aug 16, 2015 |
Lincoln Hui wrote:
Too often I have resisted the temptation to stir the waters by making the claim that those who grew up monolinguals are by nature inferior translators, not only because of their inferior language proficiency compared to those who grew up as multilinguals, but also because the inferior stimulation during the stage of growth results in a defective intellect. This is at least no more absurd than the notions on nativeness that some of us seem to legitimately believe in, and unlike many of these notions has the advantage of being impossible to disprove empirically. It would amuse me to no end what kind of response this would elicit.
There is much truth in this, even though you have said this in half-jest. In fact, I have made just this point in some of the other threads on this topic - that monolinguals knowing another language at L2 level can't make good translators, as by definition, translators have to be bilinguals who excel in two languages.
Even otherwise, the superstition about natives making the best translator is so viciously entrenched in people's mind that the only way to exorcise it seems to be to emphatically deny it even to the extend of tipping over to the other end of extremism and claiming that native translators in fact make the worst translators! May be this would produce the salubrious result of a more equidistant understanding of the issue emerging.
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 05:58
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
| Assertions are not arguments | Aug 16, 2015 |
Balasubramaniam L. wrote:
I don't think agencies, or any employer, would be too worried about having to deal with a large number of applications for job positions. It is normal in job selection procedure.
It sounds to me as if you don't understand how these things work, at least in developed countries.
If they have hundreds of applicants for a position, then HR departments start filtering them.
You are asserting, against intuituion, logic and independent evidence, that employers do not fillter and should not care about the cost of recruitment. They do filter - for native speakers, for example - and they care a great deal about costs. Why would they not?
You're in a hole. It's time you stopped digging and found a better line of reasoning.
Regards
Dan
| | | | | Children, please! | Aug 16, 2015 |
When I saw this thread, I sighed loudly. As others have commented, I knew we were in for a rehash of an old, hackneyed and much repeated theme.
We are now at the stage where the usual two camps have formed and are lobbing insults to and fro.
Perhaps it is time to lend a little gravitas to the proceedings!
In reply to the original poster, I find it rather odd that she should be contacted to work between two foreign languages. That she should work from her mother tongue directly ... See more When I saw this thread, I sighed loudly. As others have commented, I knew we were in for a rehash of an old, hackneyed and much repeated theme.
We are now at the stage where the usual two camps have formed and are lobbing insults to and fro.
Perhaps it is time to lend a little gravitas to the proceedings!
In reply to the original poster, I find it rather odd that she should be contacted to work between two foreign languages. That she should work from her mother tongue directly into Portuguese does not surprise me, since I can’t imagine there are too many Portuguese who speak good Lithuanian. Indeed, in other threads on this old chestnut, it has often been remarked, quite reasonably in my view, that people whose native language or mother tongue is a minority language often work into English as well as out of English simply because there are so few English natives competent to do the job.
It is therefore clear that there is no one answer to the question. However, as one who teaches apprentice translators and interpreters, I always insist that they should work into their mother tongue. But I am also conscious that some may take up salaried positions, as translators or in allied areas, and that they may have to work in both directions. I once had a job where that was the case. The fact that I was slower initially in one direction was irrelevant since I was paid the same whatever my rate of progress. For such students, it is vital we ensure they do the very best job possible and, rest assured, some are very good out of their mother tongue. My views are different in the case of (future) freelancers, if only because of the time factor and the probable need to employ someone to reread the text, itself an extra cost.
As to the right of clients to pick and choose, that’s life! Get over it! Having worked in HR, I am well aware that many job applications are binned without even being read, solely on age grounds. I remember well the case of a girl taken on temporarily to sift the wheat from the chaff, in other words to eliminate all applications from people 45 years and above. When demand is low and supply high, all sorts of weird and often unfair criteria come into play. But who ever said life was fair?
On a personal note, I admit to working in both directions. I’m no longer sure which is my stronger language. What I do know is that, in my specialist technical areas, I almost always work into English (unless interpreting) simply because it pays better and I have done it for so long that my reputation on the market is secure. When it comes to creative writing, not just creative translation, I am useless in English and far better in French. I am quicker, more efficient and more successful operating this way, with some rare exceptions.
We are all different and no one size fits all. There are some truly bilingual people – I know quite a few, not all translators. There are some people who work into a foreign language because the market is short on qualified mother tongue practitioners. Above all, clients’ criteria for rejecting or considering potential partners is up them: he who pays the piper, calls the tune! ▲ Collapse
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Peter Zhuang
Germany
Local time: 06:58
German to English
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Michele Fauble wrote: Peter Zhuang wrote:
My gripe was that even though I've made it clear which is my first language, some people and agencies insisted otherwise, much to my annoyance.
But isn't their skepticism due to the fact that some translators misrepresent their native language? Maybe your gripe is really with them.
Hello Michele, I think you made a very valid point which I've not thought of. But I am not too sure how well my country is represented on the market.
In my experience, I think some people are sceptical because (1) they know very little about Singapore, and more specifically, the languages used there and/or (2) they think that two countries on either side of the North Atlantic Ocean hold the duopoly on English usage.
| | | | Inga Petkelyte
Portugal
Local time: 05:58
Lithuanian to Portuguese
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TOPIC STARTER | Some with fertile imagination. Some straight to the point | Aug 16, 2015 |
A great discussion has been developed in here. In detriment to numerous other discussions related to the same topic, with mostly emotional posts, here I saw serious thoughts and inputs helping both PMs and translators to understand each other's position better.
Based on my experience, I see three kinds of clients:
● clients that are indifferent about the "native" and rather care about the competence - in my case, such are Portuguese translation agencies, Portuguese courts an... See more A great discussion has been developed in here. In detriment to numerous other discussions related to the same topic, with mostly emotional posts, here I saw serious thoughts and inputs helping both PMs and translators to understand each other's position better.
Based on my experience, I see three kinds of clients:
● clients that are indifferent about the "native" and rather care about the competence - in my case, such are Portuguese translation agencies, Portuguese courts and translation agencies in several other countries whose clients ask for "that translator"
(I hope it will be generally accepted that agencies in the target language country do have capability to assess the quality of the translation)
● label-minded clients - for these, no certificates, or exams, or whatsoever would suit
(in this particular case, it was like "But you are not native?" ... Full stop. And speaking about tests, one UK company responded, "We don't have time to check tests of everyone willing to supply them.")
● cautious but open-minded clients - for these, I would like to have some certificates ready.
It happens - what a luck! - that neither in my native country nor in Portugal any certification system exists. And these are not kind of exception, there are more countries with no translator certification policy existing.
Therefore, I would like to reiterate what Angela has said, in probably the most straight-to-the-point suggestion in this thread:
Angela Rimmer wrote:
Proz could help a great deal here. They've been talking about native language verification for a long time, but not much seems to be happening. Both clients and the translators themselves would benefit from this, as the latter would either be able to get their claims validated or realise that they shouldn't claim something.
So far, I have always suggested a potential client to give me a test translation, for the same reasons that Angela mentions. Yet certification would be a whole different level helping various translators in the same situation like mine. And PMs, for that matter. ▲ Collapse
| | | | 564354352 (X)
Denmark
Local time: 06:58
Danish to English
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| With all due respect... | Aug 17, 2015 |
Inga Petkelyte wrote: Therefore, I would like to reiterate what Angela has said, in probably the most straight-to-the-point suggestion in this thread: Angela Rimmer wrote:
Proz could help a great deal here. They've been talking about native language verification for a long time, but not much seems to be happening. Both clients and the translators themselves would benefit from this, as the latter would either be able to get their claims validated or realise that they shouldn't claim something. So far, I have always suggested a potential client to give me a test translation, for the same reasons that Angela mentions. Yet certification would be a whole different level helping various translators in the same situation like mine. And PMs, for that matter.
What makes you think that Proz can issue any kind of professional certification? Proz is a commercial website, not a professional body.
| | | | Inga Petkelyte
Portugal
Local time: 05:58
Lithuanian to Portuguese
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TOPIC STARTER
Gitte Hovedskov, MCIL wrote:
What makes you think that Proz can issue any kind of professional certification? Proz is a commercial website, not a professional body.
It is pretty clear from the quote it is not my thinking.
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Angela Malik
United Kingdom
Local time: 05:58
German to English
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| I didn't say that | Aug 17, 2015 |
Inga Petkelyte wrote: Therefore, I would like to reiterate what Angela has said, in probably the most straight-to-the-point suggestion in this thread: Angela Rimmer wrote:
Proz could help a great deal here. They've been talking about native language verification for a long time, but not much seems to be happening. Both clients and the translators themselves would benefit from this, as the latter would either be able to get their claims validated or realise that they shouldn't claim something. So far, I have always suggested a potential client to give me a test translation, for the same reasons that Angela mentions. Yet certification would be a whole different level helping various translators in the same situation like mine. And PMs, for that matter.
Just to be clear, I did not say that. Someone else said that in response to something else I said -- that a lot of people overestimate their level of command of a language when they self-assess, which makes it difficult for clients to judge whether you can or cannot actually speak that language like a native.
My suggestion to you, Inga, had nothing to do with Proz; I said that an impartial exam could go a long way in helping you market yourself in Portuguese as a non-native speaker with near-native or higher command of the language.
| | | | Inga Petkelyte
Portugal
Local time: 05:58
Lithuanian to Portuguese
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TOPIC STARTER | Quote and quoting are different things | Aug 17, 2015 |
Angela, of course not, I just don't know to make "ProZ" and "They" in bold for the lost ones
Proz could help a great deal here. They've been talking about native language verification for a long time.
| | | | Sheila Wilson
Spain
Local time: 05:58
Member (2007)
English
+ ...
| Approach someone with massive credential for help? | Aug 17, 2015 |
I really don't know if it's practical, mind you.
What I'm wondering is whether there's a governing body for the Portuguese language you could approach for help. Or the top person at one of the most renowned universities. Perhaps they would be prepared to look at your work and give a statement about the quality of your writing (a one-pager that you could put online). Of course, fraud could be suspected so to avoid that they should propose the topic, with the text delivered in a relat... See more I really don't know if it's practical, mind you.
What I'm wondering is whether there's a governing body for the Portuguese language you could approach for help. Or the top person at one of the most renowned universities. Perhaps they would be prepared to look at your work and give a statement about the quality of your writing (a one-pager that you could put online). Of course, fraud could be suspected so to avoid that they should propose the topic, with the text delivered in a relatively short time so that cobbling together work from native speakers would be pretty impossible.
I really have no idea if anyone would accept the job, nor what they would charge. But it should certainly be enough to persuade most clients to include you as a native speaker in their database.
Failing that, is there no course of study you can take where the examination is aimed at native speakers and only those whose output is impeccable will pass? ▲ Collapse
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