Billingualismm - the myths and the truth  

Oleh:

Stevenson, Robert Louis

Jenis: Article from Books - Textbook
Dalam koleksi: A Practical Guide for Translators, page 25-34.
Fulltext: 2. Bilingualism....pdf (142.49KB)

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When I wrote this chapter for the fi rst edition of the book in 1993, I telephoned the ITI with the intention of getting an accepted defi nition of bilingualism . I was informed politely that trying to get an answer would be as profi table as poking a stick into a hornet’s nest. If you have a copy of the Guinness Book of Records , look up the entry for the person who can supposedly ‘speak’ the most languages. When I wrote the fi rst edition of this book, the entry read, ‘In terms of oral fl uency, the most multilingual living person is Derick Herning of Lerwick, Shetland, whose command of 22 languages earned him victory in the inaugural “Polyglot of Europe” contest held in Brussels in May 1990’. The Guardian newspaper published the obituary of Kenneth Hale, the linguist, on November 10, 2001. He was a professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was said to be ‘the master of more than 50 languages’. The term ‘ bilingual’ is very much abused and the number of people who are truly bilingual is very small. You may have seen job advertisements for a ‘Bilingual Secretary’. I suppose the argument is that a person who is that well qualifi ed would not be working as a secretary. (This is no refl ection on the abilities of a good secretary.) The number of people who are listed in the ITI Directory as being competent to work in more than one language is very small. There is a term called ‘language of habitual use’. You may have learned one language as a child and then moved to a different country. The language of that country will probably become your language of habitual use. There is also the term ‘main language’ in use in the European Community. The ITI demands evidence of any claim to be bilingual before the person concerned can be listed as having this qualifi cation. The ‘main language’ would be the natural choice for listing in the directory. Assessment of any claim for an additional language is done by taking an examination or submitting written evidence in support of the claim.

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