The skill of natural interpreting in a trilingual child

Abstract

The present work seeks to contribute to the fields of translation and bilingual acquisition focusing on the particular case of natural translation/interpreting of a single Slovak/English/German balanced trilingual child between 0;03 and 8;01 years. Natural interpreting is a strategy used by bilinguals whereby a message expressed in one language (source language = SL) is reproduced in another (target language = TL). Our study is based on two premises: 1. Translation in a bilingual child is an innate skill which can be acquired without formal training and is developed through guidance and practice (Harris, 1978); and 2. Natural interpreting can occur within different combinations of languages. We address the issue of bilingual competence and in particular the relationship that exists between linguistic competence and performance in the process of interpretation activity in the bilingual child. The first aim of the study is to reveal the social-academic context and the main sources of linguistic input, which had an important effect on the speech development of the child. The second aim of the study is to show that a trilingual child was able to become a sophisticated interpreter as she gradually moved through stages of pre-translation, autotranslation and transduction to more complex forms of interpretation (Harris and Sherwood, 1978; Harris, 1976 and 1978). The third aim of the study is to document the types of errors produced by the child and through error analysis and statistical data reveal whether these errors may hinder the communication of accurate meaning in the TL. The translation competence of the bilingual child is analysed via different types of spontaneous, elicited and experimental data gathered from the child’s longitudinal production recorded by the researcher in diary annotations, audio recordings and video recordings. Examples of the child’s interpretations presented in this paper are transcribed in the CHAT format. The results of our study demonstrate that a trilingual child acquiring three languages in a bilingual community with the bilingual-monolingual interaction strategy used by parents at home can become a competent interpreter by the age of 8;01 years and deliver messages quite accurately in the TL regardless of the directionality of interpretation. The results of error analysis show that the type of errors produced by the child in the process of interpretation are mainly morphological and occasionally syntactic or intrusion errors, which do not lead to misinterpretation of the meaning of original message in the TL.