He was brought up in London, where he took degrees in Classical Arabic[1] and in Middle East History at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
He also studied at the American University in Cairo, and did postgraduate work on Lebanese history under Bernard Lewis, the leading Western authority on the Ottoman Empire.
From 1966 to 1972, he worked as a research assistant in the Machine Translation Project (Cétadol, later renamed TAUM) at the Université de Montréal under French computer scientist Alain Colmerauer (inventor of the programming language Prolog and a Chevalier de Légion d'Honneur).
[4] In 1972, Harris moved to the University of Ottawa, where he started a computerised documentation centre for linguistics and did research on information retrieval.
This led eventually to a very beneficial collaboration with the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain and to visits from other Spanish academics.
In 1988, Harris published one of the first articles on translation memories (which he called "bitexts")[11] and designed software for them.
This had been documented decades earlier, in 1913, by the French linguist Jules Ronjat, but his discovery was rarely replicated and nobody cited him.
[20] Then Harris had the good fortune that an educational psychologist at the University of Toronto named Merrill Swain, who was doing research on children in French immersion schools, had collected several months of recordings of a young bilingual French Canadian boy which contained many examples of him translating;[21] and as translation was not the focus of her research, she generously handed the data over to Harris.
He went through it with an assistant, Bianca Sherwood, and from it Harris was able to construct a first approximation of a developmental model of the onset of translating ability.
[22] After that Harris continued the study,[23] inspired by the discovery, also by Merill Swain, that children do not all translate the same way.
All bilinguals can translate, although their competence is limited by their proficiency in the two languages, by their knowledge and experience in general, and by their cognitive development.
But in 1994 one of his students presented a thesis study of African children which extended it to a very different culture and language, and supported the case for natural translation being universal.
The other is self-learning by imitation and absorption of existing tokens of translation and of texts, in the way that speakers learn their native language.
Returning to the question of the "third competence" that was outlined in the initial hypothesis, Harris abandoned it insofar as it was supposed to be something specific to translating.