Brian Harris (translation researcher)

Last updated

Brian Harris
Born
London, England
NationalityBritish, Canadian
Education School of Oriental and African Studies
American University in Cairo
Quai d'Orsay archives
Known for Machine translation research
Canada's first computer-assisted translation course
Natural translation theory
Interpreting in the Community (Critical Link)
Scientific career
Fields Linguistics, translation,
computer science
Institutions National Film Board of Canada
Université de Montréal
University of Ottawa
Canadian Council of Ministers of Education
Academic advisors Bernard Lewis
Alain Colmerauer

Brian Harris is a Canadian and British translation researcher.

Contents

Early life and education

Harris was born in 1929. He was brought up in London, where he took degrees in Classical Arabic [1] and in Middle East History at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He also studied at the American University in Cairo, and did postgraduate work on Lebanese history under Bernard Lewis, the leading Western authority on the Ottoman Empire. Lewis arranged for him to do research in the archives of the Quai d'Orsay in Paris.

Career

Harris first visited Spain in 1947, and returned to work there in the tourist industry in the 1950s. In 1965 he emigrated to Canada and taught English as a Second Language for several years at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal. From 1966 to 1972, he worked as a research assistant in the Machine Translation Project (Cétadol, later renamed TAUM) at the Université de Montréal under French computer scientist Alain Colmerauer (inventor of the programming language Prolog and a Chevalier de Légion d'Honneur). [2] He was co-opted to the International Committee on Computational Linguistics [3] and co-organised its conference in Ottawa, Canada in 1976. [4]

In 1972, Harris moved to the University of Ottawa, where he started a computerised documentation centre for linguistics and did research on information retrieval. [5]

Having come to the conclusion that "the problem with research on machine translation is that we don't know enough about translation", he turned to researching the translations done by children. He coined the term 'translatology' for the scientific study of translation. [6] In 1978, he and an assistant, Bianca Sherwood, published Translation as an Innate Skill, [7] which has been described as the seminal article on natural translation (translation by unskilled translators).[ citation needed ]

In 1974, he began teaching translation theory at the University of Ottawa's School of Translators and Interpreters. From 1975 to 1979, and again from 1992 until his retirement in 1994, he was Director of the School. [8] In 1976, he introduced into the School’s programme Canada’s first computer-assisted translation course. [9]

In 1980 he started the School's conference interpreter training program with Roda Roberts. It has trained a generation of young Canadian interpreters in cooperation with the Canadian government and until recently was the only university conference interpretation programme in Canada. [10] Soon afterwards, also with Roda Roberts, he started the first Spanish translation degree program in a Canadian university. This led eventually to a very beneficial collaboration with the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain and to visits from other Spanish academics. He taught Arabic to English translation for a year at the University of Jordan in Amman, and at the King Fahd Advanced School of Translation in Tangier. He has also taught and lectured in other countries.

In 1988, Harris published one of the first articles on translation memories (which he called "bitexts") [11] and designed software for them. [12]

Parallel to his academic career, Harris has also had a professional career as an interpreter. He began as a tourist and business interpreter in Barcelona and London in the 1950s and then took up conference interpreting when he moved to Canada. He interpreted at the Olympic Games in Montreal in 1976, for the Canadian Council of Ministers of Education, etc. He is certified as a translator and conference interpreter under the legislation of the province of Ontario.` [13] He served as president of that province's Association of Translators and Interpreters and as president of the national Canadian Translators and Interpreters Council; he was a member of the Council of the International Federation of Translators. He is still on the Reading Committee of the FIT journal Babel. [14]

Having become interested in court and community interpreting, Harris founded and chaired the Canadian national organizing committee of the first and second editions of the International Conference on Interpreting in the Community, known as the Critical Link. [15] [16]

Translatology

In the 1970s, after reading Eugene Nida’s Toward A Science Of Translation, Harris asked himself why there was no English term for "science of translation". He reasoned that "phonetics" is used rather than "science of speech sounds". There was discussion that a term similar to "phonetics" was needed. In 1972, Harris proposed "translatology". At the same time a French professor of translation, René Ladmiral, introduced traductologie in French. Traductologie caught on and was soon borrowed into other Romance languages as traductología, etc.; translatology never caught on and was eclipsed by ‘translation studies’, though a few people still use it. [17]

Natural translation

Natural translation is Harris' most important contribution to translation studies.[ citation needed ] In the early 1970s he began to notice that while he was supposedly teaching university students to translate, many people were doing translation successfully without such training; indeed that the untrained translators were doing more translating than the trained ones and often to just as high a standard. Many of the interpreters Harris also worked with, including some from the Parliament of Canada, had never had formal training. This led Harris to the conclusion that all bilinguals can translate within certain limits. [18]

Harris was not the first to believe this; it had already been stated by his friend Alexander Lyudskanov a few years earlier. Lyudskanov said, "Thanks to a certain intuition and to habit, every bilingual translates in some way or other." [19] However he had not realised the significance of his statement. Something similar happened with another of Harris' observation, namely that young children can translate. This had been documented decades earlier, in 1913, by the French linguist Jules Ronjat, but his discovery was rarely replicated and nobody cited him. [20] Then Harris had the good fortune that an educational psychologist at the University of Toronto named Merrill Swain, who was doing research on children in French immersion schools, had collected several months of recordings of a young bilingual French Canadian boy which contained many examples of him translating; [21] and as translation was not the focus of her research, she generously handed the data over to Harris. He went through it with an assistant, Bianca Sherwood, and from it Harris was able to construct a first approximation of a developmental model of the onset of translating ability. This was the initial Natural Translation Hypothesis. [22]

After that Harris continued the study, [23] inspired by the discovery, also by Merill Swain, that children do not all translate the same way. [24] The following sums up the initial MT Hypothesis:[ citation needed ]

1. All bilinguals can translate, although their competence is limited by their proficiency in the two languages, by their knowledge and experience in general, and by their cognitive development.

2. Therefore bilingualism is a triple competence − two languages plus translating − with the translating competence automatically accompanying the other two.

3. The triple competence can become manifest at any age, but most strikingly in young children. Indeed it is observable in children so young, without training and with so little exposure to it, that we can hypothesise it is innate.

At this point, Harris' data had all come from European languages. But in 1994 one of his students presented a thesis study of African children which extended it to a very different culture and language, and supported the case for natural translation being universal. [25] Since then Harris has extended the initial model in several directions:

1. Clearly there is a big developmental distance to cover between the natural translation of a very young child or a beginner in language learning and the skilled productions of expert and professional translators. The extended model proposes two paths for this development. One of them is what is traditionally regarded as translator training, such as university courses or work placements, or probation under an experienced translator; and it typically ends in a degree or a professional qualification.

2. The other is self-learning by imitation and absorption of existing tokens of translation and of texts, in the way that speakers learn their native language. For this Harris borrowed a term from Gideon Toury: native translation. [26]

The paths are not mutually exclusive; a budding translator may progress by a combination of the two. Harris divided the native translators, according to ability, into beginner and advanced. [27] [28]

3. Returning to the question of the "third competence" that was outlined in the initial hypothesis, Harris abandoned it insofar as it was supposed to be something specific to translating. Instead he suggested that it was a specialization of a much more general human competence: conversion. [29] Harris gave examples of non-linguistic conversion such as driving on different sides of the road. According to Ludskanov everything is represented in our minds by signs and therefore the conversions required for translating are conversions of signs.

Related Research Articles

Cross-cultural communication is a field of study investigating how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavor to communicate across cultures. Intercultural communication is a related field of study.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Legal translation</span>

Legal translation is the translation of language used in legal settings and for legal purposes. Legal translation may also imply that it is a specific type of translation only used in law, which is not always the case. As law is a culture-dependent subject field, legal translation is not necessarily linguistically transparent. Intransparency in translation can be avoided somewhat by use of Latin legal terminology, where possible, but in non-western languages debates are centered on the origins and precedents of specific terms, such as in the use of particular Chinese characters in Japanese legal discussions.

Interpreting is a translational activity in which one produces a first and final target-language output on the basis of a one-time exposure to an expression in a source language.

Translation studies is an academic interdiscipline dealing with the systematic study of the theory, description and application of translation, interpreting, and localization. As an interdiscipline, translation studies borrows much from the various fields of study that support translation. These include comparative literature, computer science, history, linguistics, philology, philosophy, semiotics, and terminology.

Beryl T. "Sue" Atkins was a British lexicographer, specialising in computational lexicography, who pioneered the creation of bilingual dictionaries from corpus data.

Antoine Berman was a French translator, philosopher, historian and theorist of translation.

Said Faiq is an established academic in the field of Translation, Cultural Studies and Intercultural Communication. He has worked in Africa, the Middle East and Europe practicing in translation and intercultural briefing for 16 years. Initially, Faiq worked in the United Kingdom at the University of Salford and the University of Leeds. At Salford, Faiq was the director of studies for Arabic/English translation & interpreting undergraduate and graduate programs from 1995 to 2001. He later moved to the American University of Sharjah (AUS) where he became the director of the Master of Arts in English/Arabic Translation and Interpreting program (2002-2007) and chair of the Department of Arabic Language and Literature (2003-2007). As of 2010, Faiq continues to teach Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Studies at AUS and focus on his research in the field of Translatology.

Mathieu Guidere is a full professor at the University of Paris and research director at the French National Institute of Health (INSERM). A scholar of Linguistics and Translation studies, he has held other professorships at prestigious institutions including the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Dr. Guidere is also the founder of the Swiss Non-governmental organization (NGO) Multilingual International Mediators (MIM), and has been awarded a Fulbright Prize to advance his research on the psychology of terrorism. He has been also editor-in-chief of the French Journal of Languages' Professors, Les Langues Modernes. In 2015, he was also Team Leader of the European Union CVE Program in the Sub-Saharan Region. In 2017, he was also the UNOWAS Senior Expert in West Africa and the Sahel Region for countering violent extremism.

Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans Josef Vermeer, was a German linguist and translation scholar.

Annie Brisset, a member of the Royal Society of Canada, is a Professor of Translation Studies and Discourse Theory at the School of Translation and Interpretation of the University of Ottawa, Canada.

Merrill Swain is a Canadian applied linguist whose research has focused on second language acquisition (SLA). Some of her most notable contributions to SLA research include the Output Hypothesis and her research related to immersion education. Swain is a Professor Emerita at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. Swain is also known for her work with Michael Canale on communicative competence. Swain was the president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 1998. She received her PhD in psychology at the University of California. Swain has co-supervised 64 PhD students.

Danica Seleskovitch was a French conference interpreter, teacher and prolific academic writer on translation studies. Among other career milestones, she founded the Interpretive Theory of Translation.

Prof. Donald C. Kiraly, is an American linguist who specializes in foreign language teaching and translator training.

The Institute of Intercultural Management and Communication or ISIT is a French Grande École.

The Faculty of Translation and Interpreting (FTI) is a faculty of the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

The Interpretive Theory of Translation (ITT) is a concept from the field of Translation Studies. It was established in the 1970s by Danica Seleskovitch, a French translation scholar and former Head of the Paris School of Interpreters and Translators. A conference interpreter herself, Seleskovitch challenged the view prevailing at the time that translation was no more than a linguistic activity, one language being merely transcoded into another. She described translation as a triangular process: from one language to sense and from sense to the other language. She coined the name Interpretive Theory of Translation and, even before Translation Studies became a field in its own right, introduced the process of translation into the vast area of cognitive research. In order to verify the first observations made as a practitioner, Seleskovitch went on to write a doctoral thesis. Soon, a handful of conference interpreters interested in research joined her at ESIT.

The Canadian Association for Translation Studies (CATS) [fr: Association canadienne de traductologie] is a Canadian non-profit organization that promotes research on translation, writing, terminology, and interpretation. It is a member of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, an organization that represents Canadian universities and scholarly associations.

Aline Remael is a Belgian translation scholar, best known for her work in audiovisual translation and media accessibility. Her impact in her chosen field is profound and she has been awarded the Jan Ivarsson Award for her services to screen translation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marianne Lederer</span> French Translation Scholar

Marianne Lederer is a French translation scholar. Lederer further developed the Interpretive Theory of Translation together with Danica Seleskovitch, who first proposed the theory. Lederer also published several works on translation and interpreting pedagogy. Her works have greatly influenced interpreting and translation research and teaching internationally.

References

  1. ↑ Harris, B. "Two Arabic particles and their English translation problems". In H. Weydt (ed.), Sprechen mit Partikeln, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1989, pp.150-159.
  2. ↑ Harris, B. "POLYGRAM grapho morphology analyzer for English. In A. Colmerauer (ed.) TAUM 71, Montreal, Projet de Traduction Automatique de l' Université de Montréal, 1971, pp. 46 105.
  3. ↑ 'ICCL committee members'. http://nlp.shef.ac.uk/iccl/committee.html Archived 17 May 2017 at the Wayback Machine , 2016.
  4. ↑ 'International Conference on Computational Linguistics'. dblp computer science bibliography', 2016. http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/coling/index.html.
  5. ↑ Harris, B., Sinas, E., Laskowski, R. "Facetted Information Retrieval for Linguistics (FIRL): Further Developments". In A. Neelameghan (ed.), Ordering Systems for global Information, Proceedings of the Third International Study Conference on Classification Research held at Bombay, India, during 6 11 January 1975, Bangalore, International Federation for Documentation. Bangalore: FID/CR and Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science, 1979, pp. 286 293.
  6. ↑ Harris, B. "La traductologie, la traduction naturelle, la traduction automatique et la sémantique". In J. McA'Nulty et al. (eds.), Problèmes de sémantique (Cahier de linguistique 3), ed. , Montreal, Presses de l'Université du Québec, 1973, pp. 133 146.
  7. ↑ Harris, B., Sherwood, B. "Translating as an innate skill". In D. Gerver and W.H. Sinaiko (eds.), Language Interpretation and Communication, ed. , New York and London, Plenum, 1978, pp. 155 170.
  8. ↑ uOttawa, School of Translation and Interpretation, 'A tribute to…'. https://arts.uottawa.ca/translation/about/a-tribute-to, 2016.
  9. ↑ Course TRA4956 'Computers and Translation / Informatique et traduction'. 3 hours per week, 3 credits. Optional 1976-1979, thereafter compulsory.
  10. ↑ Harris, B. "Teaching interpreting: a Canadian experience". Paper to the 1st Language International Conference on the Teaching of Translation and Interpreting, Elsinore, Denmark, May 1991. In C. Dollerup, A. Loddegaard (eds.), Teaching Translation and Interpreting: Training, Talent and Experience, Amsterdam, Benjamins, 1992, pp. 259 268.
  11. ↑ Harris, B. "Bi text, a new concept in translation theory". Language Monthly (Nottingham) 54.8 10, 1988.
  12. ↑ Harris, B., Lule Chen, Limang Yang. Bitexxt. Version 2.0 for Windows. Ottawa, Privately published, 1995.
  13. ↑ Association of Translators and Interpreters of Ontario. Directory. http://search.atio.on.ca/search/do/SE1031892b3e1 Archived 2016-06-05 at the Wayback Machine .
  14. ↑ Board. Babel. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/babel/board.
  15. ↑ Harris, B. "Foreword: A Landmark in the Evolution of Interpreting". In S.E. Carr et al. (eds.). The Critical Link: Interpreters in the Community. Papers from the 1st International Conference on Interpreting in Legal, Health and Social Settings, Geneva Park, Canada, 1 4 June 1995, Amsterdam, Benjamins, pp. 1 3.
  16. ↑ Harris, B. "Foreword: Community Interpreting - Stage Two". In The Critical Link 2: Interpreters in the Community / Selected papers from the Second International Conference on Interpreting in Legal, Health and Social Service Settings, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 19–23 May 1998, ed. Roda P. Roberts et al., Amsterdam, Benjamins, 2000, pp. 1-5.
  17. ↑ With Eric Sinas and Roman Laskowski. "Facetted Information Retrieval for Linguistics (FIRL): Further Developments". In A. Neelameghan (ed.), Ordering Systems for global Information, Proceedings of the Third International Study Conference on Classification Research held at Bombay, India, during 6 11 January 1975, Bangalore, International Federation for Documentation. Bangalore: FID/CR and Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science, 1979, pp. 286 293.
  18. ↑ "The importance of natural translation". (Revised version of a paper presented at the AILA World Congress, Stuttgart, August 1975). Working Papers in Bilingualism (OISE, Toronto) 12.96 114, January 1976.
  19. ↑ Ljudskanov, A. Mensch und Maschine als Übersetzer. Translated from Bulgarian by. G. Jäger and H. Walter. Halle: Niemeyer, 1972. 260 p.
  20. ↑ Ronjat, J. Le développement du langage observé chez un enfant bilingue. Paris: Champion, 1913.
  21. ↑ Swain, M. K. and M. B. Wesche. "Linguistic interaction: case study of a bilingual Child". Language Sciences 37.17-22, October 1975
  22. ↑ With B. Sherwood. "Translating as an innate skill". In D. Gerver and W. H. Sinaiko (eds.), Language Interpretation and Communication. Oxford: Plenum, 1978, pp. 155 170.
  23. ↑ "How a three-year-old translates". In Patterns of Bilingualism (RELC Anthology Series 8), Singapore, National University of Singapore Press, 1980, pp. 370 393.
  24. ↑ Swain, M. K., G. Dumas and N. Naiman. "Alternatives to spontaneous speech: elicited translation and imitation as indicators of second language competence". Working Papers in Bilingualism 3.68 79, 1974. Available online as ERIC document ED123872.
  25. ↑ Lozès-Lawani, C. "La traduction naturelle chez des enfants fon de la République du Bénin". M.A. dissertation, School of Translation and Interpretation, University of Ottawa, 1994. Adviser Brian Harris. 181 p.
  26. ↑ Toury, G. "The notion of ‘native translator’ and translation teaching". In W. Wilss and G.Thome (eds.), Die Theorie des Übersetzens und ihr Aufschusswert für die Übersetzungs- und Dolmetschdidaktik, Tübingen: Narr, 1984, pp. 186-195.
  27. ↑ ‘Essential definitions’. Unprofessional Translation blog, 13 July 2009.
  28. ↑ ‘Natural translators and musicians’. Unprofessional Translation blog, 10 May 2012.
  29. ↑ "Innateness". Unprofessional Translation blog, 25 July 2009.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.