Re: Native English Speaking Requirement

[Chuck Martin <cmartin -at- SEEKERSOFT -dot- COM>]

I am not sure that the issue is entirely valid. I'd presume that "native
English speaker" is simply a shortcut way of saying someone who has been
raised  in the language, rather than someone who has learned it through
years fo coursework.

To counter your example, my ex-boyfriend, who is Hong Kong Chinese and was
raised there, received his degree in English. He is now the assistant
editor of a magazine there. Yet there are still times when we speak that
his words aren't quite "correct;" sometimes he doesn't know the corect
word, sometimes the phraseology isn't quite on. The same thign shows in his
(English) writing. Yet overall, his English skills are excellent, he's
passed graduate exams with good scores, etc.

I think wanting someone who is fluent in both languages and cultures is
vital for the actual translation work. But I think finding someone who was
raised in the culture to polish the translated work is a good final step to
produce the highest-quality documentation. I'd say the "native English
speaker"--or perhaps better: "native North American English speaker" or
"native England English speaker" migh be more precise, depending on the
target audience of the documents--is not an unwarranted desire for that
last, polishing step. (Oy, I think that sentence was too long.)

Education in the English language is different then being raised in the
English language. Many of my classmates in my engineering classes were from
SE Asian refugee families. They took English classes, were taught other
classes in English, yet their home life was in their native language, and
indeed often socialized in their native language. Yet for some, thiei
English was quite good. That, I think, is a significant difference.

That all said, a non-native speasker can still be capapble of producing the
same polish. To automatically rule them out may deprive a company of a
qualtiy resource. But finding that quality may also be more difficult to
find in a non-native speaker.


At 01:02 PM 9/11/97 EDT, you wrote:
>I am's a little concerned. Witness the following snippets from Job Posts on
>Techwr-L:
>
>On Sep 9,  7:32am, Guy Thomas wrote:
>
>> You are a native English speaker with excellent technical writing
>
>On Sep 11,  6:18pm, Chiba Atsushi wrote:
>
>> Now we are looking for competent technical writers (native English speakers
>> only) who can proofread/rewrite translated text. Proofreading/rewriting
means
>
>My question(s):
>
>-- I had a 98 percentile score in the English part of the GRE. This means
that
>98% of people that took the GRE with me scored less than I did. And this
>definitely includes "native speakers" since this is a standard test for
>Graduate Admission in North America and beyond. This is not TOEFL I am
talking
>about, which is the Test of English as a Foreign Language. Would I qualify
for
>the above jobs? [I am not applying right now; I am quite happy with my
present
>job, thank you.] I am definitely not a "Native Speaker" since both my parents
>are Urdu-speaking [the official language of Pakistan and one of the major
>languages of North India]; but all my education has been in the English
>Language.
>
>-- What, for example, of people from Southern India? They live in country
where
>the only way they can communicate with a majority of their compartriots [and
>there's about a billion of them] is by using English. As such I would
consider
>these people very appropriate to write across cultures. And some of these
>people have a command of the language I would dare you to find anywhere else.
>
>-- Generally, if you are looking for people to write across geographical and
>cultural divides, wouldn't you rather pick a person that has experience of
>doing this or would you just look for a "native speaker" that has probably
>never even had to keep up a social conversation with a foreigner?
[Professional
>exchanges don't count; but even if they did, how many of these "native
>speakers" have had them?]
>
>And please: I am not flaming; I am not p.o.'ed; I am just raising an issue I
>want to discuss with y'all.
>
>Sabahat.
>
>--
>Sabahat_Ashraf -at- MentorG -dot- com
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>                                  -- Mother Teresa [1910-1997]
>                                  on hearing she had won the Nobel Prize
>
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--
"You don't look American"
"Everyone looks American, because Americans are from everywhere"
                                            - Doonesbury
Chuck Martin
Technical Writer, Seeker Software, Inc      | Personal
cmartin -at- seekersoft -dot- com                      | writer -at- grin -dot- net
www.seekersoft.com                          | www.grin.net/~writer

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