LL-L "Language proficiency" 2010.06.27 (01) [EN]

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*L O W L A N D S - L - 27 June 2010 - Volume 01
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From: Obiter Dictum <obiterdictum at mail.ru>

Subject: LL-L "Language proficiency" 2010.06.26 (04) [EN]



Hallo Leslie,

Thank you so much for your beautiful new story and your permission to quote
-- but I am really grateful to you for that first story you posted here four
years ago.  It was your story that really made me think and question the
value of the prescriptive (rather than descriptive) manner of teaching
translation/interpreting techniques in Russia where they teach them well
before the students have acquired the adequate command of the other
language(s) (or their native one, for that matter).

And here is another story I received last night from a Dutch linguist.

“I was walking on a country road outside Lusaka, Zambia when I heard a
girl's voice shout at me, “Pas op!” The meaning was clear to me, but I
caught myself wondering, "How come someone in Zambia speaks Dutch?".....and
a car from behind nearly drove over my foot ...”

Looking forward to more stories :)

Best regards,

Vlad Lee,

Tokyo, Japan/Moscow, Russia



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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk>

Subject: LL-L "Language proficiency" 2010.06.26 (02) [EN]



Yes, people can quote me. I'm not sure how I could stop them!

It seems to me that a theory we could put forward as an explanation for
some of these experiences is that utterances are somehow stored in a
non-linguistic form in the brain. After all, if you hear a story in
English and a week later have to tell it in French, it doesn't seem like
translating or interpreting, it just seems like talking in French about
something you know.

My feeling is that while you remember a story, the data from the
language in which it was told is quickly forgotten, except where it's
relevant to the story (such as when you have to explain a pun in French
that "just works" in the English version).

I don't think this needs to be any special linguistic mechanism in the
brain: we tend to forget irrelevant stuff (so that we can retell a story
in ten seconds that a crashing bore took ten minutes over) and the
language encoding is mostly irrelevant to everyday stories, so we tend
to forget it unless there was something about the way a thing was said
that particularly interested us.

Then when we retell or even just remember a story we may automatically
add language structures back, but more perhaps more likely in the
language our brain happens to be working in at the time than the
original language.


> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
>
> Subject: Language proficiency
>
> I wonder if there is are differences in switching and interpreting
> between two languages with regard to their relatedness or lack
> thereof.
>
> It seems to me that in my case interference is strongest the more
> closely related the two languages are, especially where there is a
> fair or high degree of mutual intelligibility.

It seems to me that when two languages are similar, then there's a
higher chance of the listener being able to understand the language not
being used as well as the language being used, so the speaker tends to
be lazier about the language choice in the course of the telling. For
example, when I go home to Scotland and I'm relating a story about life
amongst the English, there's no reason I can't quote the speakers in the
story in English, since the listeners will be able to understand it well
enough, and to a lesser extent this is true when talking about Scottish
people to the English. A switch is a switch, however, and since usually
nothing is premeditated, sometimes I can't handle the sudden switch or,
probably even worse, the switch back to the main language as quickly as
is needed and then confusion takes hold.

But when languages are completely different then the listener is less
likely to be able to understand the alternative language and so the
speaker is less likely to want to use it, and such things as the
phonetic contrasts between the languages make it easier to exclude the
other completely.

This is kind of obviously true in switching between spoken and signed
languages. I feel that the large grammatical differences between English
and BSL (which has a very different word-ordering from English) force me
to forget about English when retelling in a way that I wouldn't have to
in retelling from English to Scots.

Sometimes I also think that many potentially confusing situations are
just avoided, because the culture between the two languages is so
different. In BSL, for example, such things as puns and formalised jokes
(such as "three examples then punchline" or "knock-knock") don't seem to
be appreciated much, while typical BSL humour and storytelling
constructs (such as anthropomorphisation and anatomical incongruence)
just cause English speakers' eyes to glaze over. So potentially
problematic retellings are just not attempted.

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/



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