Now that I am 90

Last Saturday, 25 May, was my ninetieth birthday. A good moment for reflection. I want to thank publicly and profoundly all the many people who’ve helped and encouraged me to get this far. I’ve been undeservedly lucky.

To start with, of course, my parents, who bequeathed to me their genes and made sacrifices to get me a sound education. More recently my wife, who has looked after me duiing these recent years of illness, And in between them a long succesion of relatives, friends, colleagues, clients, students and Followers, too many to list in a blog post.

Looking back over my career, I think I made a few minor contributions to translatology (itself a term I introduced into English in the early 70s), and one major discovery. The latter is Natural Translation, which I formulated in 1973 as the translating done in everyday circumstances by bilinguals who’ve had no training for it. It was extended in 1976 to the hypothesis that the human ability to translate is inborn; and later to a developmental model to bridge the gap between natural translators and expert ones. (For more, enter essential definitions in the Search box on the right or click [HERE].) Acceptance of the concept has advanced only slowly in the last 40 years, but some aspects of it are now almost mainstream. Language brokering studies, starting from the USA in the 90s, opened people’s eyes to the vast amount of translating done by children. The NPIT (non-professional translation) conferences and publications of the last decade have helped brush away the cobweb of misunderstanding in the old saying that “because you are bilingual, it doesn’t mean you can translate” (or interpret, for that matter).All around us, NGOs, manga and computer game publishers, Wikipedia and others depend on crowdsourcing their translations. Of course there’s a tradeoff. Mass production and amateurism can rarely matched skilled craftmanship, but it’s a price to pay to get the translations done. (The same can be said for machine translation, the branch of translatology in which I started my career.)

So without more ado I wish you all as long a life as mine and a long career with many discoveries.

Yours,

Translatology