Thanks for the clarification. I rather suspected that it was a case of
reading one language and speaking the translation in the other. I would
wonder whether
it is as easy in languages that have different orthographies (e.g., I
find it very
difficult to do in Japanese and English, partly because of the word
order and
orthographic differences).
Actually the Somali/English situation piques my interest because I work
in
American Sign Language (ASL) and English. Like Somali, ASL has no
written form. I
can read English and sign with very little difficulty, but I find that
my signing
takes the form of ASL signs in English word order. There is
disagreement in the ASL
linguistics community about what that kind of signing really is.
However,
that is a whole different discussion than this list is prepared to
enter.
I know NOTHING about Somali, so I don't know whether, e.g., the word
order
is similar to English, etc. I can imagine going from French to
Portuguese is not so
much of a stretch.
Tane Akamatsu