Implications of bilingual innateness on translation

Psycholinguistically, the word innate in linguistics means an inherited language skill, which enables a child to speak sooner and more grammatically than can be accounted for by its contact with the environment. It also means a specialized predisposition in children to learn how to speak the language they hear in their environment.

It is a deliberate activity undertaken when one has already nearly or fully acquired the basic structure and vocabulary of one’s first language. Many people, of course, never have a significant mastery of more than their own first language; it is on getting in contact with a second language that one realizes how complex language is and how much effort must be devoted to subsequent acquisition. So, knowing one language is a great obstacle to learning a second one, and one should not believe that one’s proficiency in both will be the same or will be sufficient to be a perfect translator. It is a fact that very normal person masters his mother tongue with unconscious ease, people vary in their conscious ability to learn additional languages, just as they vary in other intellectual abilities; so being a bilingual may not amount to being somebody who could understand the intricacies of the additional language(s) acquired. Acquired bilingualism leads to mutual interference between the two languages, particularly in the meaning of words; grammatical interference, and structural interference.

As we also mentioned above, age is not the only factor to identify translation with bilingualism, there are some other factors such as personality, context, motivation. and environment, which are essential factors to apply the specialized predispositions to translation. Skills develop over time, and this development conflicts with the notion of natural translation associated with age. This is because, with constant practice, the act of translating loses its naturalness.

What is then a natural translation? Translation has been considered a way of communication by many theorists such as Catford(1965), Toury (1995), Nida (1964), and others. Toury (1995:248), for instance, defines it from a socio-cultural perspective as a mode of communicative text production. By this definition, which involves socialization, there is the feedback strategy whereby the translator receives what is known as normative feedback. The norms of society reflect the target language and culture. There is, however, no unique way of doing a translation because there is no such thing as universal criterion of appropriateness. These criteria differ from one societal group to another.

It has to be emphasized that first, a born bilingual often suffers from not truly knowing any language well enough to translate, with some even suffering from what is known as alingualism, a state in which a person lacks full fluent command of any language. Secondly, born bilinguals often don’t know the culture of the target language well enough to provide top-quality translations or cannot recognize what aspects of the source language and its culture need to be treated with particular care. Thirdly, born bilinguals often lack the analytical linguistic skills to work through a difficult text.

On the other hand, the acquired bilingual may not have the same in-depth knowledge of colloquialisms, slang and dialect that the born bilingual has, although bilingualism according to Bell Roger (1976: 132), is biculturalism which in effect means that anybody who would call himself a bilingual must also be familiar with the two cultures involved.

The translator’s gifts display not only a breadth of vision and depth of understanding of human life but also a feature which is extremely important for us—a vital receptiveness to the spiritual makeup of another people, an unusual sensitivity to their psychology, an amazing ability to switch over to the manner of another ethnic group. It is therefore not enough to just speak a language but also to be bilingual and bicultural. Aitmatov’s bilingualism, for instance, is organic to his talent. It reveals an important aspect of his artistic “I”; and therefore in his laboratory the “author’s translation” is not simply a mechanical repetition of an already created text but a new and profoundly thought-through version of it, taking into consideration the ethnicity of the new group of readers

As a translator, acquiring “the compound state of mind with two grammars” as (Cook: 2003) indicates still remains an ideal attained by relatively few individual translators (even in a “bilingual” country like Cameroon), but this does not mean that there are few bilinguals, for this paper holds the view that bilingualism is a continuum ranging from mastery of the official languages to the mastery of two national languages.

It will not suffice to end without remarking that African languages validate all criteria for making any vocal system quality for a language. Since no language serves as a measuring rod for another, denouncing bilingualism involving an African language amounts to unjustified snobbism, for learning any of them requires the same effort as does any European language. Jacobson (1953) Romaine, (1995) writes: “Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.” It really is, given the linguistic reality that all languages are equal in complexity and difficulty in mastering them.