To all readers of this blog
A belated Happy New Year and Better 2022!
The blog has been desultory in the past few months due to an effect of ‘long Covid’, but I hope to get it back on track before long.
2022 marks an
anniversary. It’s just 50 years since the inception of the concept and term
Natural Translation (NT). To most people the inception came with publication of
the paper The Importance of Natural Translation in 1977. However, the term and
concept had already appeared in 1973, not in English but in French as
traduction naturelle. It was in French because it was in a paper read at a
conference at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), a French-speaking
university. But even that wasn’t quite the beginning, because although the
French paper wasn’t published until 1973, the conference had taken place the
previous year, 1972. It was a conference at which several of my colleagues of
the machine translation project at the Université de Montréal (TAUM) also read
papers and it was my final academic contribution before moving to Ottawa. Hence
1972-2022, fifty years.
In the beginning encouragement
mainly came not from translators but from psychologists: Wallace Lambert (pioneer
of Canadian bilingual education) invited me to his graduate seminar at McGill,
Kenji Hakuta (educational psychologist at Stanford) supervised the thesis of Marguerite
Malakoff, David Gerver (clinical psychologist) invited me to the fabulous 1977
NATO conference in Venice. But then some bold translatologists joined in: Gideon
Toury invited me to write something for Target; Fritz Pöchhacker and colleagues
in Vienna were advisors for the thesis of Petra Beckmannova; Raffaela Merlini (Trieste) and Cecilia Wadensjö
(Linköping) were advisors for the thesis of Diana Cossato; Ricardo Muñoz invited me to Granada; María Jesús Blasco organised
a conference in my honour at Castellón; María Gracia Torres sponsored my
honorary doctorate at Malaga, and Boguslawa Whyatt produced a developmental model
of translation competence quite similar to mine.
If I had to distinguish a turning point
in all that has happened so far, I would unhesitatingly pick the First Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting
and Translation (NPIT), which Rachele Antonini organised at Bologna in 2012. The
number and scope of the papers showed that NPIT was an area that could no longer
be considered maverick. The ensuing NIPT conferences have confirmed it,
although NT has never obtained the primacy – with everything else in
translatology being “the icing on the cake” – that I polemicised for it in my
spat with Hans Krings in Target.
Meanwhile there are two important aspects
of NT that are still little recognised and therefore under-researched. The first is its innateness;
for this the abundant proof that children can start to translate very young is important
but not sufficient. Anyway innateness is a bone of contention in all linguistics. The
other is the place of translating in the broad spectrum of transfer of
information and emotion from any form of human expression to another, a process
not necessarily linguistic that I have called conversion.
References
Bibliographic references for all the
publications mentioned above can be found in the Annotated Bibliography of
Natural Translation Studies at https://independent.academia.edu/BHARRRIS.
