Brian Harris is a Canadian and British translation researcher.
Early life and education Harris was born in 1929. He was brought up in London, where he took degrees in Classical ArabicHarris, B. "Two Arabic particles and their English translation problems". In H. Weydt (ed.), Sprechen mit Partikeln, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1989, pp.150-159. and in Middle East History at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He also studied at the American University in Cairo, and did postgraduate work on Lebanese history under Bernard Lewis, the leading Western authority on the Ottoman Empire. Lewis arranged for him to do research in the archives of the Quai d'Orsay in Paris.
Career Harris first visited Spain in 1947, and returned to work there in the tourist industry in the 1950s. In 1965 he emigrated to Canada and taught English as a Second Language for several years at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal. From 1966 to 1972, he worked as a research assistant in the Machine Translation Project (Cétadol, later renamed TAUM) at the Université de Montréal under French computer scientist Alain Colmerauer (inventor of the programming language Prolog and a Chevalier de Légion d'Honneur).Harris, B. "POLYGRAM grapho morphology analyzer for English. In A. Colmerauer (ed.) TAUM 71, Montreal, Projet de Traduction Automatique de l' Université de Montréal, 1971, pp. 46 105. He was co-opted to the International Committee on Computational Linguistics'ICCL committee members'. http://nlp.shef.ac.uk/iccl/committee.html , 2016. and co-organised its conference in Ottawa, Canada in 1976.'International Conference on Computational Linguistics'. dblp computer science bibliography', 2016. http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/coling/index.html.
In 1972, Harris moved to the University of Ottawa, where he started a computerised documentation centre for linguistics and did research on information retrieval.Harris, B., Sinas, E., Laskowski, R. "Facetted Information Retrieval for Linguistics (FIRL): Further Developments". In A. Neelameghan (ed.), Ordering Systems for global Information, Proceedings of the Third International Study Conference on Classification Research held at Bombay, India, during 6 11 January 1975, Bangalore, International Federation for Documentation. Bangalore: FID/CR and Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science, 1979, pp. 286 293.
Having come to the conclusion that "the problem with research on machine translation is that we don't know enough about translation", he turned to researching the translations done by children. He coined the term 'translatology' for the scientific study of translation.Harris, B. "La traductologie, la traduction naturelle, la traduction automatique et la sémantique". In J. McA'Nulty et al. (eds.), Problèmes de sémantique (Cahier de linguistique 3), ed., Montreal, Presses de l'Université du Québec, 1973, pp. 133 146. In 1978, he and an assistant, Bianca Sherwood, published Translation as an Innate Skill,Harris, B., Sherwood, B. "Translating as an innate skill". In D. Gerver and W.H. Sinaiko (eds.), Language Interpretation and Communication, ed., New York and London, Plenum, 1978, pp. 155 170. which has been described as the seminal article on natural translation (translation by unskilled translators).
In 1974, he began teaching translation theory at the University of Ottawa's School of Translators and Interpreters. From 1975 to 1979, and again from 1992 until his retirement in 1994, he was Director of the School.uOttawa, School of Translation and Interpretation, 'A tribute to…'. https://arts.uottawa.ca/translation/about/a-tribute-to, 2016. In 1976, he introduced into the School’s programme Canada’s first computer-assisted translation course.Course TRA4956 'Computers and Translation / Informatique et traduction'. 3 hours per week, 3 credits. Optional 1976-1979, thereafter compulsory.
In 1980 he started the School's conference interpreter training program with Roda Roberts. It has trained a generation of young Canadian interpreters in cooperation with the Canadian government and until recently was the only university conference interpretation programme in Canada.Harris, B. "Teaching interpreting: a Canadian experience". Paper to the 1st Language International Conference on the Teaching of Translation and Interpreting, Elsinore, Denmark, May 1991. In C. Dollerup, A. Loddegaard (eds.), Teaching Translation and Interpreting: Training, Talent and Experience, Amsterdam, Benjamins, 1992, pp. 259 268. Soon afterwards, also with Roda Roberts, he started the first Spanish translation degree program in a Canadian university. This led eventually to a very beneficial collaboration with the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain and to visits from other Spanish academics. He taught Arabic to English translation for a year at the University of Jordan in Amman, and at the King Fahd Advanced School of Translation in Tangier. He has also taught and lectured in other countries.
In 1988, Harris published one of the first articles on translation memories (which he called "bitexts")Harris, B. "Bi text, a new concept in translation theory". Language Monthly (Nottingham) 54.8 10, 1988. and designed software for them.Harris, B., Lule Chen, Limang Yang. Bitexxt. Version 2.0 for Windows. Ottawa, Privately published, 1995.
Parallel to his academic career, Harris has also had a professional career as an interpreter. He began as a tourist and business interpreter in Barcelona and London in the 1950s and then took up conference interpreting when he moved to Canada. He interpreted at the Olympic Games in Montreal in 1976, for the Canadian Council of Ministers of Education, etc. He is certified as a translator and conference interpreter under the legislation of the province of Ontario.`Association of Translators and Interpreters of Ontario. Directory. http://search.atio.on.ca/search/do/SE1031892b3e1 . He served as president of that province's Association of Translators and Interpreters and as president of the national Canadian Translators and Interpreters Council; he was a member of the Council of the International Federation of Translators. He is still on the Reading Committee of the FIT journal Babel.Board. Babel. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/babel/board.
Having become interested in court and community interpreting, Harris founded and chaired the Canadian national organizing committee of the first and second editions of the International Conference on Interpreting in the Community, known as the Critical Link.Harris, B. "Foreword: A Landmark in the Evolution of Interpreting". In S.E. Carr et al. (eds.). The Critical Link: Interpreters in the Community. Papers from the 1st International Conference on Interpreting in Legal, Health and Social Settings, Geneva Park, Canada, 1 4 June 1995, Amsterdam, Benjamins, pp. 1 3.Harris, B. "Foreword: Community Interpreting - Stage Two". In The Critical Link 2: Interpreters in the Community / Selected papers from the Second International Conference on Interpreting in Legal, Health and Social Service Settings, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 19–23 May 1998, ed. Roda P. Roberts et al., Amsterdam, Benjamins, 2000, pp. 1-5.
Translatology In the 1970s, after reading Eugene Nida’s Toward A Science Of Translation, Harris asked himself why there was no English term for "science of translation". He reasoned that "phonetics" is used rather than "science of speech sounds". There was discussion that a term similar to "phonetics" was needed. In 1972, Harris proposed "translatology". At the same time a French professor of translation, René Ladmiral, introduced traductologie in French. Traductologie caught on and was soon borrowed into other Romance languages as traductología, etc.; translatology never caught on and was eclipsed by ‘translation studies’, though a few people still use it.With Eric Sinas and Roman Laskowski. "Facetted Information Retrieval for Linguistics (FIRL): Further Developments". In A. Neelameghan (ed.), Ordering Systems for global Information, Proceedings of the Third International Study Conference on Classification Research held at Bombay, India, during 6 11 January 1975, Bangalore, International Federation for Documentation. Bangalore: FID/CR and Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science, 1979, pp. 286 293.
Natural translation Natural translation is Harris' most important contribution to translation studies. In the early 1970s he began to notice that while he was supposedly teaching university students to translate, many people were doing translation successfully without such training; indeed that the untrained translators were doing more translating than the trained ones and often to just as high a standard. Many of the interpreters Harris also worked with, including some from the Parliament of Canada, had never had formal training. This led Harris to the conclusion that all bilinguals can translate within certain limits."The importance of natural translation". (Revised version of a paper presented at the AILA World Congress, Stuttgart, August 1975). Working Papers in Bilingualism (OISE, Toronto) 12.96 114, January 1976.
Harris was not the first to believe this; it had already been stated by his friend Alexander Lyudskanov a few years earlier. Lyudskanov said, "Thanks to a certain intuition and to habit, every bilingual translates in some way or other."Ljudskanov, A. Mensch und Maschine als Übersetzer. Translated from Bulgarian by. G. Jäger and H. Walter. Halle: Niemeyer, 1972. 260 p. However he had not realised the significance of his statement. Something similar happened with another of Harris' observation, namely that young children can translate. This had been documented decades earlier, in 1913, by the French linguist Jules Ronjat, but his discovery was rarely replicated and nobody cited him.Ronjat, J. Le développement du langage observé chez un enfant bilingue. Paris: Champion, 1913. Then Harris had the good fortune that an educational psychologist at the University of Toronto named Merrill Swain, who was doing research on children in French immersion schools, had collected several months of recordings of a young bilingual French Canadian boy which contained many examples of him translating;Swain, M. K. and M. B. Wesche. "Linguistic interaction: case study of a bilingual Child". Language Sciences 37.17-22, October 1975 and as translation was not the focus of her research, she generously handed the data over to Harris. He went through it with an assistant, Bianca Sherwood, and from it Harris was able to construct a first approximation of a developmental model of the onset of translating ability. This was the initial Natural Translation Hypothesis.With B. Sherwood. "Translating as an innate skill". In D. Gerver and W. H. Sinaiko (eds.), Language Interpretation and Communication. Oxford: Plenum, 1978, pp. 155 170.
After that Harris continued the study,"How a three-year-old translates". In Patterns of Bilingualism (RELC Anthology Series 8), Singapore, National University of Singapore Press, 1980, pp. 370 393. inspired by the discovery, also by Merill Swain, that children do not all translate the same way.Swain, M. K., G. Dumas and N. Naiman. "Alternatives to spontaneous speech: elicited translation and imitation as indicators of second language competence". Working Papers in Bilingualism 3.68 79, 1974. Available online as ERIC document ED123872. The following sums up the initial MT Hypothesis:
1. All bilinguals can translate, although their competence is limited by their proficiency in the two languages, by their knowledge and experience in general, and by their cognitive development.
2. Therefore bilingualism is a triple competence − two languages plus translating − with the translating competence automatically accompanying the other two.