diskcat

>A guy who is 100% fluent in source and 99% fluent in target will produce a perfectly clear but very slightly stilted translation,because he's not aware of the few mistakes that he makes.

Why isn't the reverse true? It is only that the lossyness of the conversion process is invisible in the result, so somebody reading it would not know that it's wrong, it still produces the same quality of translation i.e. that its not perfect (or as good as can be).

Additionally, there are so many words in english that it's not possible to know them all, and so one has to assume that all people are at most 99%. But my english alarm doesnt go off everytime a word like 'mellifluous' isn't used. So I even doubt the claim that a guy who is 99% in the target language will make a 'stilted' translation. There exists a skill level where a person can produce a text that won't read as 'wrong' but won't be as good as it could possibly be and this skill level is sufficient to not have a text feel stilted. Not to mention most people do not have the same writing skills, and a very good high school student writer writes a much more pleasing text than his schoolmate who is not very good.

>but in practice there's a surprisingly large gap between that and a person who can speak fluently on complex subjects with no fear of being misunderstood, but makes occasional minor errors--or even usages which are grammatically correct, but sound stilted--that betray them as non-native.

Well the purpose of translation is communication, not hiding your nativeness, do I don't see the point of this.

>There's a big jump between 99.9% and 100%

Well the jump is between 0.1%

>and if you want a really professional translation job, you're not going to settle for 99.9%.

That's like saying if i wanted to hire an engineer to build me a nuclear reactor im gonna pass everybody who scored 99.9% on a test in favor of the magical unicorn who by virtue of being born in the beautiful blue glow of a reactor is the only being capable of scoring 100%.

Either the gap is actually bigger then 99.9-100 as you say, or the gap is so small as to be insignificant.

People can vary greatly in english skill if they are not native and while you can most likely figure out whether or not they were born where by their accents and their way of speaking, a sufficiently skilled speaker would give you no more trouble in communicating to you whatever complex ideas they might have in their mind.

The only reason I can think of of this restriction is protectionism, i.e. a translator union located in England would want to protect its members from competition and find it most convenient to claim a special status on nativeness without coming off as obviously anti-competitive.

Wait what?

This doesn't sound right to me at all.

There is no arbitrary skill ceiling that can only be achieved by being a native speaker.

It's the price of operation on the internet. There are more avenues of abuse and so they have to be very strict. This resulted in a lot of frustrations from the users, but there is nobody doing better.

If by nuaced you mean introducing external factors to cloud the problem.

At the end of the day, if it's 'mutually beneficial', how could it possibly be 'exploitation'?

It's other people's job to make sure their map is good. If they had failed in doing so, i'm pretty sure they would rather have, in your contrived example, a dude with a tank of water selling them overpriced H2O than to die in a desert.

it's actually a pretty good idea.

who wouldn't want to be born with excellent immune system, strong and tall, smart and attractive?

Could you be any more conceited and self-satisfied?

All you do is say that the poster is uneducated, but have made zero attempt in educating him, other readers or advancing any argument against what was posted.

so tell me, if i was in a desert and somebody is really thirsty, why is it unethical for me to sell him some water?