Near-native

On the other hand, Coppieters' (1987) study of nearnative speakers of French, selected by nativespeaking friends and colleagues for perceived nativeness in production, showed nonnative intuitions on the perfective/imperfective distinctions in French in a judgement test.

Anyone who has been engaged in language translation or has read the same text in two different languages knows that some nuances may be lost in translation, and this untranslated five percent or so makes a difference. As long as not all people have fluency or near-native knowledge in all languages and cultures, translation cannot be avoided, and, thus, one must accept at least some ambiguity.

[…] these data constitute little support for the notion of generalized competence differences between natives and near-natives.