Not enough native English speakers?

lai an wrote:

The translation market may be changing too.

As demand for foreign products grows, foreign economies become more powerful, and more foreign students study overseas, I believe there may simply be more demand for translations of foreign-language texts.

From, say, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese and Russian.

the real reason

The realreason there are not enough english native language speakers around in translation is simply that we are notoriously bad at teaching and learning languages.

don't forget we once had an empire that covered a lot of the globe it is up to 'Jonny foreigner' to learn English and if we as Brits go overseas (to any country) and come across a native of that country that for some absurd reason doesn't speak English then it is quite simple. We speak slowly and raise our voices that will make them understand.

The amount of times i have been on holiday and heard comments like 'They don't do much English food' or 'They don't speak much English' is amazing and really brings it home to me that as a nation we sometimes let ourselves down.

Mind you seeing some of the youngsters today how do you expect them to learn a foreign language to any degree of competency when they can't even master our own!

Emandan wrote:

... what actually qualifies someone as a native speaker of a language?