Brian Harris (translation researcher)

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 is Harris' most important contribution to translation studies. 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:

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.