As a group of linguists, this article is an interesting look at the true definition of fluency. Since fluency is an abstract concept, Daniel Morgan reports that the two most reliable assessment factors are speech rate and utterance length. Speech rate is quantifiable as syllables per minute of effective language and utterance is how long a person can speak without hesitating or pausing. Accuracy, at the end of the day, is the definition of fluency. And while this article is about spoken fluency, one must then consider what it takes to translate? What level of fluency is required in BOTH languages to be able to produce high quality, accurate and RELEVANT language translations?
