Language learners do not simply ‘learn a language’; they tend to turn their subjective experience into ‘naive theories’ of language, cultures and learning which display a hidden system of ‘everyday language philosophy’. According to Vygotsky, both everyday and scientific concepts co-exist and inter-act in the individual mind. This mixture eventually affects language learning activities and results.
Interviewing and discourse analysis techniques (a 30-year long observation, questionnaires, self-reports and essays) disclosed a system of everyday language philosophy expressed through meta-communicative messages about language. Phrases referring to language in literary texts and internet blogs (the ‘public image’ of language) were also taken into consideration.
Personal theories and individual technologies of language learning reveal two major misrepresentations: what is generally studied is not language, but ‘units’, and, further, these units have to be ‘acquired’ almost mechanically like ‘objects of the outer world’. Metaphors shape attitudes, and the language ‘acquisition’ approach reflects the reification metaphor. Language as a whole is limited to lexicon, and personal language learning technology is, therefore, equal to pure memorization of words, similar to the ancient metaphor of a wax tablet. Foreign languages are collections of ‘strange names’ for ‘usual things’. Beginners in translation studies also display typical personal constructs in word-for-word translation, ‘correct translation’ ideal, etc.
The dialogue of the interacting parties (teacher/student) will remain half-broken without learning what the students think about language, and, in return, without some sort of linguistic enlightenment.
Keywords: naive metalinguistics, language learners’ beliefs, everyday language philosophy
Metalinguistic Discourse and Naive Theories of Language
Metalinguistic discourse is part of overall meta-cognitive activity which is aimed not so much at cognizing the outer world, but at cognition itself and embraces controlling, monitoring and discussing this activity (“thinking about thinking” and “talking about thinking”). Various aspects of metacognition have become the focus of a whole line of research in the humanities (Flavell, 1979; Jakobson, 1981; Hyland, 2005; Fox & Riconscente, 2008; to quote just a few).
Metalinguistic activity (“talking about talking”) is aimed at self-control of language use and improving language learning, and implies monitoring these domains, reflecting upon them and making deductions about them. Language learners do not simply learn a language and speak it, they make generalizations about this activity in order to organize and improve it. They have their own beliefs about the structure of language and language differences. They also draw conclusions about linguistic and cultural differences, demand what should be taught to them as language students and how.
“Thinking about language” is rarely fully verbalized, like it is done in “official” linguistics. Metalinguistic knowledge is generally seen through language learners’ actions, or represented in their personal learning strategies. Folk linguistics is also scattered in separate metalinguistic utterances found in everyday discourse or generated in experimental environments (questionnaire responses, interviews, and so on). This sort of Wittgensteinian “tacit knowledge” (Polanyi, 1983; Johannessen, 1996, pp. 294-295), after the observations have been classified and viewed as a whole, displays a hidden system of naive views. The all-embracive span of this system and its significance for language use and learning allows naming this system “everyday language philosophy”. It is extremely important to study the metalinguistic beliefs in students of LSP, since their training does not include “official linguistics”, and their naive minds are “unspoilt” by language theories.
Naive metalinguistics (or folk linguistics, Sprachbewu?theit, language awareness, personal constructs of language, personal strategies of language learning, language learners’ beliefs, etc.) has recently drawn the attention of many international researchers (Horwitz, 1987; Dufva, 1994; Kalaja, 1995; van Lier, 1997; Wenden, 1998; Арутюнова, 2000; Кашкин, 2002; Kashkin 2007; Barcelos, 2003; Дебренн, 2006; Голев, 2009; etc.). Western scholars preferred experimental studies centered upon language learning, while in Russia primary interest lay upon culturally-related concepts and metaphoric expressions involving language and its units, primarily, in literary fiction and folklore. Both lines of research, in fact, revealed similar ways in which language is conceptualized in human mind (be it naive or scientific).
Naive theories of language even if they remain unexpressed serve as the basis for naive learning technologies, personal learning strategies and techniques. Vygotsky (Выготский, 2006, pp. 845, 920) continuously stressed the idea that both naive and scientific concepts co-exist and inter-act in the individual mind. The mixture of naive language mythology and official scientific knowledge is the actual scene against which personal language skills and linguistic knowledge are developed. As far as the research proved, the actual scene is very different from what teachers usually presume their students should think. The interacting mixture of naive and scientific knowledge eventually affects language learning activities and is the main cause of many deviations and “mistakes”. Teachers’ conceptions are often also a mixture of contradictory and ambivalent beliefs. Enhancing metalinguistic awareness of both teachers and students is likely to lead to more reliable results of language learning.
Research Methods and Materials
The materials upon which the present paper is based, as well as the previous papers published within the scope of this project, have been collected for over 30 years, starting with spontaneous classroom observation and developing into analysis of samples from various spheres of metalinguistic discourse. The following discursive genres were taken into consideration:
– student everyday discourse about language and learning languages;
– teacher everyday discourse about language, learning languages, and students;
– “folk linguistics” as reflected in non-linguistic publications in newspapers and other media (general public discourse);
– “linguistic advertising” (presentation of language courses and books to the target groups of the general public);
– “folk linguistics” in literary fiction and folklore.
The whole scope of naive linguistics was approached with a multifaceted set of research methods. The first and most traditional one was internal observation performed by a teacher (or by an “insider” student) within their mutual learning environment. The materials collected included the following:
– teachers’ complaints about students’ mistakes;
– teachers’ reports on students’ erroneous learning actions;
– students’ complaints on “wrong methods” of teaching;
– students’ reports on their learning actions and activities, termed as “language learning careers”, “histories” or “trajectories” by van Lier (1988), Benson (2008), and others, or “student narratives”;
– primary attribution and cause/effect analysis of linguistic actions made by students themselves when explaining their own progress, difficulties, success/failure, etc.
The materials were gathered mainly through personal impromptu communication, and the results were later developed into questionnaires and interviews. The questionnaires were of different kind:
– pilot “open answer” questionnaires;
– multiple-choice questionnaires;
– Likert-scale questionnaires, testing the degree of acceptance of various statements about language learning and languages learned.
Everyday linguistics is rarely verbalized, so it was necessary to initiate the respondents to put their “theories” into words. It was achieved by implementing various interactive psycholinguistic techniques, among them the following:
– clinical interviews (goal-oriented interviews or “interviews with a purpose”);
– students’ self-reports (sort of “written interviews”) revealing both “hesitation points” in studying a language and learner’s beliefs about language;
– essays on relevant topics (How I studied the English language; What am I going to learn a foreign language for; Why I decided to become a translator/interpreter, etc.).
The materials were collected by the author of the article himself with extensive assistance of his post-graduate students, as well as teachers in workshops on naive metalinguistics in Russia and Finland. The teachers worked mainly with school children or non-linguistic students studying ESP or other foreign languages at technical universities. The section on naive translation is in progress now, and involves a longitudinal study of naive freshers becoming professional translators.
Since metalinguistic knowledge is not fixed, but rather continuously acquired and developed, the degree of “naivete” is not the same in representatives of different social and age groups (Kashkin, 2007, p. 183). In questionnaires, interviews and narratives quoted in the article the age and social group are indicated in brackets when applicable.
Both oral and written interviews had a double purpose. The purpose, declared outwardly to the interviewee, consisted mainly in discussing his/her achievements and difficulties of language learning. The inner purpose, known generally only to the interviewer (and researcher), was to clarify the interviewee’s attitude towards language learning, his/her beliefs, personal theories and techniques of studying languages, etc. Transcripts of interviews and essays were then subjected to discourse analysis to reveal metacommunicative messages, verbalized language and cultural stereotypes, and the like.
Metalinguistic statements are also scattered in texts of various genres: from proverbs and sayings to novels and newspaper articles. Although traditional methods of text analysis were not excluded, much impetus to the project was given by making use of contemporary electronic text corpora and search engines. Recently, as internet communication developed rapidly, a new source of naive beliefs about language was added, which included internet chat forums, blogs and life journals. Being extremely spontaneous, these texts are very much close to orally conducted interviews. The analysis of texts was aimed primarily at metaphoric representations of language, word, and other key concepts of naive metalinguistics.
The present article mainly quotes the examples from a corpus of internet blogs, recently collected with the help of existing blog search engines, as well as some samples from language course advertising, exploiting the general public’s assumptions and mythology of language. Parallel examples from questionnaires and interviews as well as from literary fiction and blogs are sometimes also given.
Discussion
Personal theories and individual technologies of learning a language reveal two major misrepresentations: what is generally studied is not language, but ‘units’, and, further, these units have to be ‘acquired’ almost mechanically like ‘objects of the outer world’. Language as an object of studying is limited to lexicon, and personal language learning technology is, therefore, equal to pure memorization of words, similar to the ancient metaphor of imprints on a wax tablet. Foreign languages are regarded as collections of “strange names for usual things”. Beginners in translation studies also display typical personal constructs in word-for-word translation, believing in the “correct translation” ideal, etc.
Personal theories and personal technologies. After analyzing questionnaire responses and self-reports, we singled out two domains of naive metalinguistics: intra-cultural and cross-cultural mythologemes (summed up in Kashkin, 2007). Later both were divided into two sub-types: cognitive, or proto-theories, and procedural ones, or proto-technologies. This may be correlated with Ryle’s two types of knowledge: know-that and know-how, or propositional and practical knowledge (Ryle, 1949). The domain of everyday linguistics is thus comprised of two major branches: naive language theory (what is language and what it consists of, etc.) and naive linguistic technology (how to use language, how to study languages, etc.). Personal theories and technologies embrace a system of “personal constructs” (Kelly, 1964) that are very often contradictory to scientific theories or even facts and data from the “real world” of language activity. In many cases it leads to what used to be traditionally blamed as “mistakes”, or, generally speaking, to erroneous or deviant linguistic behavior, as stated by Debrenne (Дебренн, 2006), ineffective personal learning strategies, etc.
Differences and similarities between languages can not fully explain deviations in learners’ speaking or writing in a foreign language. A couple of examples will be given to show that “mistakes” are very often due to erroneous naive theories, and not to the classical idea of language systems “interfering” with each other.
Many Russian ESP learners persistently pronounce hotel, machine, etc. stressing the first syllable. The first reaction of teachers we interviewed was to explain it by “interference”. But, in fact, the same French borrowings in Russian have the “correct” stress on the last syllable: otel, mashina, etc. So, there is no interference at all. Further interviews, this time with students, displayed a very peculiar interpretation of the choice made by the learners. Many of them attributed their “wrong” pronunciation to the following: “I said so because I wanted it to sound more English-like”. Thus, the naive phonetics seems to have formulated – usually implicitly – the following law: “In English all the words are stressed on the first syllable”.
Intra-cultural mythologemes include reification of words: words or other language units are treated like material things, or chosisme (Bachelard, 1983); “natural connection” belief (physei instead of thesei); contextual determinism: situation and context mechanically predetermine what linguistic units will be used in an utterance; discrete semantics bias: meanings are minor “things” within one big “thing” – a word, and they can be counted.
Cross-cultural mythologemes include “easier” native semantics: a word possesses one or two definite meanings in the mother tongue, but there are more meanings in a foreign language; word-per-word translation technique; native preference: words in the native language are more “natural”; semiotic frontier axiology: the native language is usually most “beautiful”, “correct”, “clear”, etc. (Кашкин, 2002; Kashkin 2007).
Everyday language philosophy, as results of research show, is a complicated domain of human thought and action, embracing all spheres of language use and learning. It is exceptionally metaphoric, since metaphor/comparison is the primary instrument of cognition (Lakoff and Johnson, 1972; Kramsch, 2003, pp. 111-115; and many others). We will be able to speak mainly about the basic reification metaphor and the effect it produces upon foreign language teaching and learning.
Reification metaphor. Everyday language philosophy includes (as any other philosophy) a branch which may be termed as language ontology. It presents the naive conception of the way and the forms in which language and language units exist in the world. Reification metaphor (“Words are things”) is the fundamental one for naive metalinguistics, it is the basic myth-creation principle. In fact, reification lies in the core of all other folk conceptualizations of language as well as in personal learning techniques. Metaphors shape attitudes, and the language “acquisition” approach in official linguistics also reflects the reification metaphor. With this metaphor, the learner as if “eats up” the language (Benson, 2008).
The basic element of naive linguistics is the concept of ‘word’ which is righteously considered the quintessence of naive linguistics by Levontina (Левонтина, 2000, p. 290). The naive mind is capable of guessing the double nature of words as temporary markers of immaterial meaning: Slovo nie vorobej, vyletit – ne pojmajesh “A word is not a sparrow, if it flies out, you’ll never catch it” (Russian proverb), or Words are not just wind, They have something to say (Chuang Tzu). But the major tendency in conceptualizing the word is its reification. The naive mind tends to represent the word as a thing, the immaterial as material. Folk science follows the pattern of mythology, likeness, and metaphor, and is essentially contradictory, or grasps the contradictory principles of the dialectics of nature as stated by Ulybina (Улыбина, 2001, p. 111).
So, the word is a thing in naive linguistics (a “grain of sand” or a “construction brick”, cf. Lakoff & Johnson), the utterance is a range of things (almost like a range of bricks), language as a whole is conceived as a collection of things (a big bag full of bricks), i. e. exclusively as lexicon. Words and messages are compared to transported material goods, which is similar to what Lakoff and Johnson, and, earlier, Reddy encompassed under the term “conduit metaphor” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1972, p. 206). Maturana and Varela argue that “metaphor of the tube” transmitting physical containers of information is basically false, since information is not transmitted to, but rather produced, or reproduced, by the receiver (Maturana, 1987, p. 196-212).
Naive linguistics nevertheless prefers the “real thing”. A word-thing is treated like a material thing, it can be given or taken, etc.: before you give me your word; and he would die of grief if I did not keep my word!; Money, money, – he took the word into his heart (heart also being a container) as a miser might do (Gutenberg Search); Und was soll ich sagen: Er hat Wort gehalten “And what should I say: he has kept his word” (blogger.de), etc.
The word-thing is closely related to the human body that produces oral words: He looked at her a moment, then by some effort choked down the word he would have spoken, and went on with his bitter confession; You know I'd never breathe a word to anybody (Gutenberg Search). After it leaves the body it can be cut, broken, destroyed, etc.: I regret that so much of the spoken word is now cut; I couldnae withdraw the plighted hand, Nor break the word once said (Gutenberg Search). The substance that leaves the body is materialized: usciva insieme parole e sangue “words and blood went out together” (Dante Alighieri, quoted by a blogger), J’ay un bon mot sur la langue, mais je ne le puis dire “I have a good word on the tip of my tongue, but cannot say it” (Proverbes), slovo vertits’a na konchike jazyka “the word is twisting on the tip of [my] tongue” (Russian Sayings).
Word-things can be taken, they can be lost, thrown etc.: Ja-byvshaya pisala haiku i lubila igrat’ so slovami “Me-the-former wrote haiku and like to play with words”; Inogda ja priachu ot teb’a slova “Sometimes I hide words from you” (Live Journal); Zabiraju vse plokhie slova pro svoego Vovku “I am taking back all my bad words about my Vovka”; A ty by takimi slovami nie razbrasyvals’a poka ne razobrals’a chto k chemu “You’d better not throw such words around before you know what happened” (Yandex Blogs); ho preso una parola e l’ho messa in una cassaforte... “I took a word and put it into a safe…” (blog.libero.it). On the other hand, Haiku can not be composed of different pieces; it should be forged like gold (Matsuo Basho, quoted by a blogger). Everyday knowledge is contradictory, reflecting the contradictions of the reality.
We quote examples taken from texts in several languages, at the moment not taking into consideration the different language-specific instances of metaphoric representation, but dwelling upon similar patterns found in all sample corpora from English, Russian, German, Italian and French.
Further discourse analysis gave collocations that reflected the materialized qualities of the reified word: legche vsego spriatats’a za vseoshche izlublennymi slovami “It is easiest to hide behind the commonly beloved words” (Live Journal); mezhdu vami – stena iz soten dnej, skazannykh slov… “There is a wall between you, a wall made of hundreds of days, of uttered words…” (Yandex Blogs). Human words can be heavy or light, dirty or clean, they may be of certain color, weight, etc.: Bjuts’a kamennyje slova “Stony words strike against you” (Live Journal); Spasibo za teplyje slova “Thank you for warm words” (ICQ, Superenysh, 3/04/2007); Skepticism Is Not A Dirty Word; the status of obscure words and random internet finds (Google Blogs); Queste parole di colore oscuro “These words of dark color” (Dante Alighieri, quoted by a blogger); Une parole douce ne blesse pas la langue “A soft word does not harm the tongue” (Proverbes). The actions with words resemble actions with physical entities: He <…> butchers the words in his ugly mouth (Google Blogs); Er sammelt etwas, das wir taglich tausendfach in den Mund nehmen: Worter “He collects something we take into the mouth thousands times a day: words” (blogger.de).
One of the most essential qualities is the word’s market value: jesli vashi slova chego-to stojat “If your words are worth anything” (Live Journal); about the value of God’s word (Gutenberg Search). The word might become alive and act, run, fly, etc.: one word blew utterly away (Gutenberg Search); words move about in the shadows; A word that began to go round; Words are pale shadows of forgotten names <…> Words can light fires in the minds of men (Google Blogs); un amico severo, la cui parola e fuoco che purifica “a severe friend whose word is a flame that purifies”; Vse eti strashnyje slova sdelali svoe delo “All these frightful words have done their work” (Live Journal). Futile actions and words are valued very low: Chi vuole insegnare a volare agli asini, si perde il tempo, le parole e i passi “The one who wants to teach donkeys to fly, loses time, words and steps”; Mnogo slov – malo dela “Many words [but] little deeds”; slovesnyj ponos “word diarrhea”; word vomit; words are the fool’s money, etc.
The word itself is also a container. The inner side of the word as reflected in naive linguistics contains meanings: meanings packed into one word; Words are bodies whose members are letters; derriere les mots il y a quelque chose dedans et quelque chose dehors “behind the words, there is something inside and something outside”. The word-thing consists of smaller meaning particles that can be counted. In one’s native language the word possesses only one meaning or the meanings of the words are not numerous. In a foreign language, on the contrary, the word has multiple meanings. Naive language statistics gives the following results: Russians have 2–3 meanings [in a word], and Americans have from 1 up xn (Russian student, 20). Naive linguistics reflects the emotional side of cognition: one meaning is easy; many meanings are difficult to grasp. Foreign languages are difficult (there is a gradation, of course). Difficulty and complexity correlates with its opposites, simplicity and discreteness. Man intuitively believes in the simplicity of knowledge (Bachelard, 1983). The preferred way knowledge must be presented to the naive mind is “in portions” (сf. Mori, 1999, p. 396; Schommer and Walker, 2005). Progress in a foreign language may lead to a loss of subjectively felt complexity: After all the English I had learned, those English words I had learned were very simple things, very unimportant things (Benson, 2008).
Language as lexicon. “Language is a collection of words”. Language is restricted to lexicon in naive linguistics. The material collected from questionnaires and self-reports is sometimes very definite about the origin and nature of words, and about what might be termed as “naive topology of language”: Jazyk – eto sbor slov, kotoryje my uznali iz dostovernykh I dostupnykh istochnikov “Language is a collection of words we learnt from reliable and accessible sources” (schoolgirl, 12); Slova nakhod’ats’a v jazyke “Words are situated in language” (student, 16); Jazyk eto sochetanie zvukov proiznos’ashchikh chelovekom iz oblasti rta, s pomoshchju kotorykh ludi obshchajuts’a. Sam jazyk nakhodits’a chut’ vyshe nosoglotki <…> Slova soderzhats’a v legkikh s vozdukhom, pri vydykhanii oni neredko mogut vyletet’ samoproizvol’no. Vuzual’no ikh mozhno nabludat’ v razlichnykh slovariakh “Language is a combination of sounds pronouncing by man from the region of mouth, which is used for human communication. The language itself is situated a bit higher than the nasopharynx <…> The words are contained in lungs together with air, while breathing they often fly out spontaneously. They can be visually observed in various dictionaries” (student, 19; the grammar of the original has not been corrected which is partially reproduced in the translation); Slova sletajut s gub, znachit nakhodilis’ oni v soznanii “Words fly down from one’s lips, that means they were situated in the consciousness” (hospital nurse, 22). Every thing – and words are things – must have its place.
Learning languages is memorizing words. Language learning is viewed as a purely quantitative, not as a qualitative achievement: “The more words you know, the better you know the language”.
Naive metalinguistics serves both as primary explanation and as practical guidance for language learners. Belief is a rule for action, as was stated by Peirce, “our beliefs should be such as may truly guide our actions so as to satisfy our desires” (Peirce, 1877, pp. 7-8; Barcelos, 2003). In fact, in the eternal dispute between knowledge and belief, the everyday user usually – and naturally – prefers belief. Desire and belief are prior to knowledge. Knowledge serves more as a socially accepted form of preserving the results of human cognition than as concrete guidance in everyday action, it is a form of “fixing belief” (Peirce). Knowledge requires time for some sort of verification procedure, or application of some sort of intellectual technique. The acting human being does not have enough time for repeated verification, and prefers myth as “the instant vision of a complex process” (McLuhan, 1996, p. 164).
The “thingness” myth is followed by a procedural mythologeme: the more words you learn, the better you’ll know the language. This idea was repeatedly found in many responses to questionnaires and in interviews, as well as in popular articles about language learning and in advertisements of language courses. What is generally studied is not language, but language units. These units moreover are treated as objects of “the outer world” which have to be mechanically “acquired”.
A foreign language is conceived primarily as a school subject with separate elements to be memorized, rather than a means of communication or an activity to be mastered. This is one of the multiple instances when everyday philosophy influences everyday activity of naive language learners. The desire to acquire knowledge in portions, in “construction bricks” is considered to be one of the common “epistemological beliefs”, characteristic not only of language learning (Schommer & Walker, 1995; Mori, 1999).
Advertising to the naives. “With us, you will learn more words, faster and cheaper”. Language courses are part of the linguistic market for those wishing to “master a language”. Usually they are sure that one can learn “spoken language” “without grammar” under some special circumstances (watching video, under hypnotic trance, through subliminal messages, using unique technologies, etc.). Naive language mythology makes it easier for the advertisers to advance such “unique selling propositions” that exploit both the ignorance of naive language users and their desire to save all effort.
Analysis of texts from the internet, email and ICQ advertisements (spam, or unsolicited adversiting) proved that their “catching point” is in that they expect their reader to believe in the usual myths. “Learning a language is learning words”, figures and “statistics” add authority to the ad:
Learning 10,000 most frequently used English words online free of charge;
Our project data base contains 10,000 words most frequently used in spoken English;
The software vocabulary is from 4,000 (Standart*) to 10,000 words (Professional). To compare, the average vocabulary of a university graduate in linguistics is 10,000 words, and ordinary language courses offer only 600-700 words per level.
“There is one unique most correct translation for every word and sentence”:
Your computer will tell you what the correct translation really is
“Learning is acquiring”, so one can spare money and effort:
Studying English with us is not only more pleasant, but also more economical.
The advertising technology also exploits the vague notions of grammar, spoken and written language, like “Studying grammar is tedious”, “One needs to study spoken language”:
The course is comprised of two levels: The first level offers memorizing passively 2,000 words that are used in the spoken language. The second level includes learning grammar and oral speech that is lexically identical with the previously learnt vocabulary, which is why it is easily memorized.
In addition to all that, one should believe in “miracles” of the “technological era”:
25 frames per second: no effort required. The miracle will occur due to special computer software that presents lexical units at a very high frequency using the 25-th frame effect. What you have to do is only sit and watch the screen. You will memorize more than 10,000 words in a couple of months. And this is equal to that big dictionary you have always dreamt of learning by heart!
To ensure fast memorizing, the software uses the effect of cyclic resonance which appears when the student is subsensorially (subconsciously) exposed to a list of foreign words with translations (dictionary). As a result, the foreign words are memorized very fast and remembered for a long time.
The advertisements of this kind, in fact, are not pure fraud; it is a response to those who really think like the following girl: “I would like to master spoken English fluently, but without all that grammar!” (visitor to a language center, 22).
“Translating is substituting words”. Naive translatology follows the principal reification myth and invents a technology generally restricted to word substitution:
Why do you need time at all? Is it really difficult for you to translate from Russian? Just substitute English (Finnish, French, etc.) words for the Russian ones! (translator’s complaint, multiple examples).
Why should I pay for your translation? It contains less (variant: more) words than the original! (translator’s complaint, multiple examples).
The algebra of translation is turned into simplistic arithmetic, like in the following example:
Happy! S prazdnikom! “Have a good holiday!” (on a plastic bag). The author of this mistranslation surely knew the phrase Happy New Year, equal to the Russian S prazdnikom Novogo Goda! The naive mind calculated the result for every holiday by the following arithmetic action with the words: S prazdnikom Novogo Goda! – Novogo Goda = S prazdnikom! (which is quite OK in Russian), consequently, Happy New Year – New Year = Happy! (which looks ridiculous in English).
Moreover, customers and outsiders usually think that translation is not a specialized professional field, and can be done by everyone by using a dictionary or translating into one’s native language when the dictionary is not necessary:
I would also recommend against paying for a professional translation. In addition to being ridiculously expensive, there’s just no reason for it, particularly when one is translating into one’s native language and has a decent knowledge of the original language (translation.blogspot.com).
The comment of a professional was very harsh:
they are trying to get a long legal translation on a delicate subject requiring well-polished professional skills by relying on the skills of a mob of untrained amateurs (translation.blogspot.com)
But it was in vain, since for a naive customer translation is equal to knowing the language, and, consequently, knowing the words.
One more comment:
A common misconception about the translator is that he or she is a living dictionary, taking a text in a foreign language and turning it into something a little more accessible to the target audience. Some believe that anyone who can speak a foreign language well can excel as a translator <...> While online translation engines are a popular tool for anyone needing quick results, these often translate word for word and are unable to identify set expressions, resulting in a stilted approximation which lacks the fluency and natural feel of a text produced by a human being. Translation, is much more than substituting words of one language into another; it’s an art (translation.blogspot.com).
It might appear that there are people who just do not know how to translate using transformations, semantic development or other translation techniques: Before I translate the text, I have to translate the words (ESP student, 20). Simply put, there are professional translators and lay people.
The situation is, in fact, far from being that simplistic. The following groups in their different relation to professional and everyday translation (or similar) activity can be singled out:
– professional translators;
– students of translatology (sometimes already working as professional translators),
– non-linguistic (ESP) students engaged in quasi-translation activities for learning purposes;
– customers of translation bureaus or freelancers,
– readers of translated work (partly those mentioned previously);
– general public (embracing all of the previous groups).
Although the term “general public” would be applicable to everyone, even professionals in their leisure time, it makes sense to speak about this group as the collective creator of the “public image” of translation as mechanical substitution of words.
Communication is exchange of bricks, and translation from one language to another is substituting bricks of one color with bricks of another color. Is it really difficult to translate from French? (the interviewee studied only English) I’ll take a French-Russian dictionary and do it (ESP student, 18). Or the common belief in both teachers and students: The bigger the dictionary, the better it is for translation (learning).
Training translators/interpreters is another broad domain where naive proto-theoretical knowledge is developed into some sort of “scientifically based” technology. Translation techniques have always vacillated between the two opposites: verbum e verbo vs. sensum de sensu (St. Jerome). Verbum e verbo is reflected in the naive conceptions of word-by-word translation, search for the “unique correct translation”, the public image of translation as a simple substitution of words, the first approaches to machine translation, etc. Sensum de sensu is considered to be “scientific” (the contemporary scopos theory of translation, etc.).
Foreign languages and cultures. “Strangers speak strange languages. Our language is the most beautiful and correct one”. Foreign languages are treated as collections of “strange words for usual things”.
The public image of a foreign language plays a certain role in learning it, and is very often crucial in choosing the language to study. The latter factor is extremely important sociolinguistically since it is related to the job market for language teachers in this or that country.
The concept of a foreign language or of a foreign culture in the public mind has practically no relation to their linguistic characteristics. It is a hetero-stereotype that reflects the historical and social factors of its formation. Foreign language stereotypes are the more axiological and emotional, the closer the foreign nation was in contact with the reflecting culture: The Italian language is suited for singing and for naming dishes. The German language is suited for war and speaking about sports, more examples in (Kashkin, 2007, pp. 197-198). Political changes are also among those factors which influence the public image of a foreign language: Ukranian ranks second in the world for its melody, after Italian. I judge really not by political but by objective views; The Ukranian language was invented with the purpose to make people laugh (housewife, 35).
(Life Journal).
Teacher/Student Dialogue
“Todo hacer es conocer” or “All knowing is doing, all doing is knowing” (Maturana & Varela, 1987). Learning languages is also learning them through action. Nevertheless, the naive learners bases their approach to language upon the reified word and accumulation technology. Learning a language is learning words, “acquiring” them as material products. The popular scientific term “acquisition” is also basically metaphoric and corresponds to the well-known conduit metaphor or communication through a tube.
The teacher of languages has had special training to develop her/his ideas about language and learning into what might be called “scientific approach”, though, in fact it is not always so. The main challenge though, is in the fact that the linguistically trained teachers usually expect their students to think about language and learning in the way the teachers do. The material presented in the previous sections of the article proves that naive metalinguistics is different from these expectations.
The teacher and the student make part of dialogical interaction. But if they (mainly, the teacher) do not know anything about each other’s presuppositions and preliminary knowledge, the dialogue will remain half-broken.
It is not only teachers who have to learn more about their students’ naive theories of language. Language learners also need a new sort of instruction about language that might be called linguistic enlightenment. This will also make them shaman-proof and turn to professional linguistic advice (Bolinger, 1980, p. 188), since the naive mind without enlightenment is eager to welcome any unprofessional promise of a miracle.
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