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"Rule of Seven" | ||
Tags: Number of Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6272 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 49 of 78 20 March 2010 at 2:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Wolf Frank, a German Jew who emigrated to the UK to escape Hitler, was a star simultaneous translator at the Nuremberg trial in 1945-6. Unusually, he could do German-English and English-German - nearly all translators at Nuremberg could only go in one direction. Edited by William Camden on 24 March 2010 at 3:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 50 of 78 20 March 2010 at 6:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
If guess you are right. But it has a wider perspective: if you waste your time getting obscure details in your target language absolutely right then you won't have time for the really useful things. Those details may be important for people who already are advanced speakers and who want to attain near-native fluency, but not for those who still struggle to become functional in a language, and certainly not if you want to learn several languages (and hopefully even use them).
That's the other end of the spectrum. If you want to be a professional translator or (even worse) interpreter then you must be top-notch in both languages, and then you must have learned all the dreary small details I dismissed above. However there is a problem here: those linguists who spend all their time discussing arcane constructions in a language may become so obsessed with that corner of the language that it won't help them to become near-native speakers. And the genuinely harmful 'Chomskyian revolution' has led much lingustic research into a blind alley where the focus has been on artifacts created by the theoretical framework rather than on features of the target languages (or maybe I should write "target language" = English here). I would rather expect the good translators to be moderately interested in languages, less so in linguistic theory, and to have a good practical background from long stays in relevant places. Edited by Iversen on 26 March 2010 at 11:08am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5470 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 51 of 78 20 March 2010 at 7:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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William Camden, you're right, but I was talking about translator who work with written texts. Simultaneous translators are what is usually called "interpreters". Sorry for not being clear. That's why, I agree with Iversen, you have to be better if you want to be a interpreter because you can be in situations where you need to translate in both languages. Plus there's the whole instantaneous thing that means you can't afford to make mistakes or correct something later or look it up in the dictionary. Edited by joanthemaid on 20 March 2010 at 7:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kerateo Triglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 5646 days ago 112 posts - 180 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English, French Studies: Italian | Message 52 of 78 20 March 2010 at 7:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well... Somebody already said something like that, but from my experience I got to French B2 in about a year (wasting a lot of time, like with Rosetta stone), it has taken me around 3 months to get to Italian B1 (getting better at studying, and Italian is a french/spanish mix), and all in all I think I could get to English/French/Italian/Portuguese/Romanian and Catalan C1, plus my native Spanish in about 5 years... not a lifetime. Now, I don't think there can be someone who can reach Icelandic/Finish/Basque/Japanese/Arabic/Mandarin/Korean C1 in a lifetime unless he has aspergers and a lot of free time.
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| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6272 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 53 of 78 24 March 2010 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I tend to use translator and interpreter interchangeably (perhaps I shouldn't).
At Nuremberg there was also a huge amount of document translation. Hitler's interpreter, Paul Schmidt, even assisted, even though he was a prisoner himself as a war crimes suspect (he was released in 1948). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6865 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 54 of 78 24 March 2010 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't think that 7 is the limit. I think 7 might be the average limitfor most people, rather than an absolute limit. Also, fluent in 7 brings us back to the old question of what counts as fluent
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| JS-1 Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 5983 days ago 144 posts - 166 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), German, Japanese, Ancient Egyptian, Arabic (Written) | Message 55 of 78 25 March 2010 at 1:54am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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If you can't quantify fluency, how can you quantify the number of languages in which you
can become fluent? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5986 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 56 of 78 25 March 2010 at 3:27am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It's not that you can't quantify fluency, it's that different people call different things fluency. For some people, talking about everyday things with a vocab of < 1000 words is "fluency", as long as they don't stutter. For others, fluency means near-native. Many people also don't understand the difference between those levels, or how much work is actually required to get from one to the other.
I'm willing to believe that it's only possible to be near-native in a handful of languages, but there are several examples on this forum of people who can speak many languages without hesitation on a variety of topics, even though they might not have near-native accent or vocabulary. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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