On Writing: Foreign languages in an English story

You've seen these stories. Characters are either multilingual or they meet other characters who speak a foreign language. Perhaps the conversation is not being carried out in English despite the fact that this is an English narrative. What to do? I am, of course, talking about language that hasn't crossed over into English as cliche, like cest la vie or carpe diem has. I'm talking about foreign language that a non-speaker would most likely not know, like j’espere.

Strunk and White are pretty adamant about this. Don't use foreign words. Others aren't so immobile on the issue.

What if the character whose POV the narrative is currently knows that language so could feasibly recollect it accurately? What if the characters are speaking in a different language around someone who doesn't know it? What if, what if, what if. I'm sure we could all come up with some scenarios where the use of foreign language is plausible. Share if you've got them.

Have you done it? Do you think you might do it? What do you think it adds to the narrative? Does it make any difference if the reader doesn't understand it? What do you think? Please, be as verbose as you like. Examples are always nice!

I tend not to use foreign languages in any of my stories, simply for the reason that I'm fairly multi-lingual and I find it difficult to understand which bits non-speakers will and won't get.

However I have seen a foreign language done superbly in my favourite book - Shogun, by James Clavell. The main character is an Englishman called John Blackthorne, whose ship runs aground on the undiscovered Japanese islands. He has to deal with the Portugese Jesuit priests who wish to kill him and the Japanese daimyos (kings) who are in the middle of a civil war.

Throughout the book, Blackthorne learns Japanese and Clavell manages to mix the language throughout the book so well that I actually learned a basic grounding in Japanese from the novel. He starts off with explaining every word of Japanese and by the end of the book, common phrases like Domo arigato goziemashita (A very thankful thank you), Nan desu ka? (What is it?) and Shigata ga nai (General expression meaning 'What else could you have done?') are just pitched in on the assumption that you understand them. I may be strange because of my ability with languages, but I certainly did and I thought it was superbly written.

The Earl

I was hoping someone else might have replied by now. I choose not to use any foreign phrases for the opposite reason to TheEarl - I don't know any well enough. I can just about make myself understood in French, and have about four words of Gaelic (not counting whisky bottle labels).

TheEarl makes a good point about Shogun - having the reader learn the language along with the character - but it could get irritating with a more familiar language. I have seen the device used where the character addressed responds with a translation, used interrogatively. For example:

"Les cloches!" Pierre muttered.

"The bells?" said John, "What about the bells?"

But this device too can irritate if used to excess. I think in general I will continue to avoid the use of a foreign language in a story.

Alex

If the writer is good enough with construct of context, even a fictitious language can be understandable to the reader.

I always marvel at Anthony Burgess; "Clockwork Orange" is liberally interspersed with "nadsat"- or, the teenage language of the future, which is a cross between English rhyming slang, puns and phonetic Russian.

However, after the first few pages, the vocabulary becomes learned, and you think nothing of it- soomkas, chellovecks, starry old psitsas, devotchkas, peeting moloko with knives, pretty polly, rainbows round the glazzies, litso, groodies, platties, the old in-and-out, the p and m, the stadja, mesto, appy polly loggies, droogs...

Burgess basically teaches you his vernacular through total immersion.

It must work...I recalled all of the above from memory, and I haven't re-read the book in at least eight years.

However, words and short phrases are a far cry from entire conversations or sentences.

I think overuse of foreign language comes off as TTH on the part of a lot of authors. I think of Barbara Cartland and her crappy French injections. I also think it's a cop-out.

but that's just me...

mlle

I'm currently working on a story in which one of the main characters speaks about 21 different languages (depending on how you count them). She receives phonecalls from all over the world and switches back and forth between multiple languages at once.

The other main characters are not fluent in most of the languages and my intent is to put the reader in their shoes. Therefore, I only include actual foreign dialog when I intend that the reader would have a chance at understanding the words. For the rest, I describe the conversation rather than relating it. Example:

The phone rang; a light flashed next to the German flag. "Guten Tag?", Rachael answered, tossing her flaming red hair over her shoulder and turing very serious, "Danke, ... ahlzo..." and on it went.

The young woman, who moments ago had been flirting with Jean Paul, was now respectfully conversing with some important sounding person and taking notes furiously in German.

Her mouth moved differently. From the sound of things, it seemed as if she should be spitting all over the desk. Instead, her lips and tongue danced with precision around the words, sanding them smooth with precise edges.

A fertile imagination conjured images of other wonderful things her mouth might accomplish...

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I occasionally use a different language if it is appropriate to a character. Often, if I intend to have characters conversing in a language other than english I will begin the conversation in whatever language they are using. I try to keep this short, to the point and then move back into english so at most the reader would have to know a few words of the second language.

I feel like a few phrases in French add a flair and realism to the work if the main character speaks French. Luckily I am not cursed with being bi-lingual so there is no temptation to carry this beyond a small sample for color.

Of all the bad feedbacks I have received no one has ever complained about a few phrases in a diferent language so I have to assume people don't find it that distracting, but I am careful never to include anything in the second language that is central to the story.

-Colly

Robert Ludlum, whose characters are always jet-setting international spies and assassins, uses a lot of foreign languages and phrases in his books. He generally uses the translated phrase immediately afterward, or makes the meaning immediately clear from context. It's almost a convention with Ludlum novels:

"For some reason, Ramon's muttered words ran through her head. El diablo sabe mas por viejo que por diablo. The devil knows more because he is old than because he is the devil."

"Trevor grimaced. He didn't mind spending money, but he resented highway robbery. He switched to German so Otto would miss nothing. 'Der Markt ist mit Makarovs uberschwemmt.' The market's flooded with Makarovs.

'These things are a dime a dozen,' Trevor continued in German..."

In his books, it seems to work pretty well -- adds the foreign flavor to the conversation without alienating the reader.

--Zack

Mlle: You forgot to mention that Burgess also included a glossary at the end of "Clockwork Orange" that was several pages thick. Even so, he did a very horrorshow job with the slang.

I recenty read Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose", set in an Italian monastary in 1312. Great chunks of text are in Latin with no translation. Okay, I'll let him get away with that, but then the very last sentence in the novel, the one that finally explains the name of the book, is in Latin and indecipherable to me. That just seems rude.

I've been reading John O'Hara's short stories lately. He was an absolute master of dialogue, and I picked up a trick from him concerning dialect, but I think it might work to with foreign languages too. If O'Hara wants one of his characters to speak in dialect, he'll throw in a few dialect terms in the first time the character speaks. Nothing fancy, maybe just a "wouldya" or something. That's enough to fix in your mind that this character speaks in dialect, so for the rest of the story your mind supplies the accent or dialect without him having to spell it out. It seems to work pretty well.

---dr.M.

hey Mab-

Really? Glossary? You don't say. That's pretty cool. None of my copies have it- I wonder why not.

Regardless, you wouldn't really need one, anymore than you do for Steinbeck.

mlle

MlledeLaPlumeBleu said:

hey Mab-

Really? Glossary? You don't say. That's pretty cool. None of my copies have it- I wonder why not.

Regardless, you wouldn't really need one, anymore than you do for Steinbeck.

mlle

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Yep. I must have read that book when it first came out in paperback, must have been like 69 or something, and it had a glossary in the back. I was reading way over my head and I wouldn't have made it through at all if it hadn't been for the glossary. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about at first, but then I got so into it that I still use some of that slang. I got so crazy that I actually went around for a couple months with a britva (straight razor) kept in a holster in my boot. I was nuts, I tell ya.

---dr.M.

I speak Canadian French at home and was forced into learning Latin growing up in private school. Yet still I post in english (or a good broken english) growing up in Boston.
I like to end the story with a single line after the story in French or Latin that pertains to the story "moral". I tend to get more replies by e-mail interpetating the one sentence. Kind of a way to get a response.
Besides it is easy with all the online translators today.


"You like the Juice Non!"

I don't mind.

I don't mind a little foreign language in a novel. I am currently reading Tami Hoag's A Thin Dark Line, it has creole french in it. Not much is missed though and it does come with a glossary at the end. It is actually so well done that sometimes you can just guess what the character is saying.

If the writing is bogged down with lots of foreign language it just becomes to hard to read.

I just took a peek into a book that simply drove me nuts. It was a book about a german girl arriving in America and settling in Nebraska with a man - also originally german - who has a tiny farm there. The woman who wrote the book has wrt\itten others about early settlers in America and such. What annoyed me is that she would throw quite a few phrases of German into the conversations or even thoughts of the main character, and while in the part I read the spelling was correct, capitalization and grammar had quite a few mistakes immediately obvious to any native German speaker.

It made me angry. How can neither the author nor the editor get the idea to have a native German speaker check the book before publishing? It's not like we're talking some obscure ancient language here. If a language is used in a published book, and the author is not a native speaker, someone else needs to check these things before publishing, in my opinion.

I did it in my most recent work, no one has complained yet. But I'm guessing they'll be starting up soon.

I use (over use) foreign language in stories. In most of my stories I try to keep it down to a few words and phrases. In two of the stories I've published here, I've made extensive use of Esperanto. On the one hand many readers deeply resent having to put any effort into a book. On the other hand, I feel that it can be an excellent device to build atmosphere and pull the reader deeper into the story.

Off-hand I would have to say that if you are writing for a broad audience (and want to enjoy commercial success) then you should avoid using too much foreign language. If you are writing for yourself, or for an audience that will appreciate the language and not mind a little extra work, go wild.

I am being a little sneaky with my current story that is with the editors. Our protagonist asks another character if she speaks Chinese, and the person responds in a couple sentences seemingly in Chinese. This answers the exact question, but the protagonist never gets around to asking what was said. Since it is first POV and the protagonist doesn't know Chinese, I left the Chinese sentences untranslated for the reader as well. The sneaky part is that I asked the reader to write me if they want to know what was said. Hee hee. Maybe it will increase the Feedback whenever the story comes out.

However, now that I think about it, none of my editors have asked me what it means either. Doh.

I'm going to have to come up with more sneaky tricks in the future.

M-Y

I hate to see foreign languages in English stories...

and I'm not a native English speaker. I did read Shogun in English, and he built the whole book around the lack of cultural understanding as well as language. As you learn Japanese you also begin to understand enough of their culture to understand what they are doing and why. If I remember it happens about the time the old man gets rid of the stinky bird.

However, unless you're writing a 10,000 page book on the clash of cultures you shouldn't do it. Yes there is a percentage of the population that loves to spend time trying to figure that sort of thing out, but what you're really doing is making it hard for your reader to understand your story. In the example above some one talked about a character changing from language to language. Frankly, I thought that the part about how her voice changed and spraying the desk made the point much better than dropping phrases. That works well in film but not in print.

I only speak three language with anything close to native skill. However, I can make myself understood in a number. Even so, I hate to have to drop out of my reader's trance to switch to a different mode. If I'm thinking in English I still find it jarring to read a phrase in my own language!

So, I'm with those who say NEVER!!!!!!!

If Art Imitates Life...

Then yes, by all means use multiple languages, but do not forget your audience. Your erotica will lose verve if the reader is put off by the incomprehensible. As much as I like James Joyce, "Finnegan's Wake" is unreadable to me. As for the proper method to translate one language to the other, don't worry, you'll figure it out.

M-Y-Erotica said:

I am being a little sneaky with my current story that is with the editors. Our protagonist asks another character if she speaks Chinese, and the person responds in a couple sentences seemingly in Chinese. This answers the exact question, but the protagonist never gets around to asking what was said. Since it is first POV and the protagonist doesn't know Chinese, I left the Chinese sentences untranslated for the reader as well. The sneaky part is that I asked the reader to write me if they want to know what was said. Hee hee. Maybe it will increase the Feedback whenever the story comes out.

However, now that I think about it, none of my editors have asked me what it means either. Doh.

I'm going to have to come up with more sneaky tricks in the future.

M-Y

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I think it is quite reasonable to expect a reader to know foreign phrases that are oft-quoted sch as 'Je n'avez pas besoin de cette hypothesis' or 'Die Welt ist verrucht' but it should be done with caution or could look pretentious.

On Chinese, how on earth can you put the tone markers in? Without them, surely there is room for considerable ambiguity; e.g. does 'shui ba' mean 'Have you any water?' or 'Would you like to sleep with me?'?

EC

Saw this thread on my way out.

I'm currently working on a series of vampire stories. He's French, so I often throw in bits of French to 'flavour' the story.

He's more likely to say 'de rien' than 'it's nothing'. Or 'merci' than 'thank you'.

Once, I used some French to show the shock he felt at that point in the story. People tend to fall back on their mother tongue when shocked. The French appeared as thought, but I added an English translation right after it, so the reader wouldn't puzzle over it.

His lover, an American woman whom he recently made a vampire of, is starting to use French in her dialogue. Lovers often take on some of the traits of their partner, and living in Paris for a year she's likely to use that language more than English.

So for me, I'll use other languages for flavour and characterization, to advance the story. I won't use it for language and culture lessons. Clavell can get a way with that, I can't.

I like the way it is done in some Tom Clancy books (not saying he invented it, probably not, this is just where I recall seeing this technique). The idea is to be very moderate with foreign words, to use them for added flavour, but still maintain readability. This means that either you explain the event or image in English first, and then put one or two foreign words, or you otherwise make it clear what the character is saying despite the fact that he is talking in a different language.

<i>"Ja," nodded the German captain in agreement. </i> for example, is perfectly obvious even to the person who has no clue that Ja means yes. So it is not only acceptable, but desireable, in my view.

rgraham666 said:

Saw this thread on my way out.

I'm currently working on a series of vampire stories. He's French, so I often throw in bits of French to 'flavour' the story.

He's more likely to say 'de rien' than 'it's nothing'. Or 'merci' than 'thank you'.

Once, I used some French to show the shock he felt at that point in the story. People tend to fall back on their mother tongue when shocked. The French appeared as thought, but I added an English translation right after it, so the reader wouldn't puzzle over it.

His lover, an American woman whom he recently made a vampire of, is starting to use French in her dialogue. Lovers often take on some of the traits of their partner, and living in Paris for a year she's likely to use that language more than English.

So for me, I'll use other languages for flavour and characterization, to advance the story. I won't use it for language and culture lessons. Clavell can get a way with that, I can't.

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Rob, for once I totally disagree with you. Keep your foreign languages out of English writing.

The French, the Germans, even the Chinese read American novels and watch Hollywood movies translated/dubbed into the native language. No-one thinks twice that the Terminator speaks perfect French or the mexican gardener in Desperate Housewives is fluent in Mandarin.

The Anglo-Saxon arrogance to assume that 'foreigners' have some sort of difficulty speaking and thinking in English is way off-beam and an insult.

Has anyone ever seen the non-English mother tongue contributors to the site ever fall back into their own language - even when shocked.

Playing with foreign language snippets is a sure way of showing your superciliousness and pissing off a large proportion of readers.

Drop the 'de rien' and just go for the fact he is Creole, French or Quebecois - that's what every other language does.

What language does my new Vietnamese heroine speak, Chinese or French?

Dumbing down.

Just glance at any 19th century Russian novel (even in translation) to see how much 'Francais' is used in dialogue. If the last poster is right then we would ban dialect too. Lady Chatterley's Mellors speaks in a language quite foreign to her ladyship; and good luck to him. And then there's Trainspotting!!!!!

A good English dictionary will contain most commonly used foreign phrases. I do not write for readers who can't be bothered to use a fucking dictionary. So there!Si j'ai besoin de mots etranges... Caveat emptor.

Dumbing down? Niet! Ohki! Bu shi!

Danke shoen. Bis bald.
Evelyn

evelyn_carroll said:

Just glance at any 19th century Russian novel (even in translation) to see how much 'Francais' is used in dialogue.

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Evelyn, the question as I understood it is not about language per se, but about language foreign to your audience, the language they cannot understand. Your example above is therefore incorrect, because the audience of the 19th century Russian authors spoke perfect French. It was the language of Russian nobility during the period, learned since birth and routinely used in normal conversations. And, of course, nobility was the primary audience for works of that period, since serfs simply couldn't afford books, and most of the time were illiterate even in Russian.

I can't comment on the other two examples you gave, but I still stand by the simple logic that if your audience cannot understand what you are saying, they cannot appreciate it. Assuming the author's goal is for everyone to appreciate his work, it seems undesirable to write in a way that his readers wouldn't understand. I wouldn't call it dumbing down, but rather having considerationg for who your reader is. If you write only for the multilingual audience, you will repel those who speak only the primary language.

Interestingly enough, the 'foreign language' doesn't even need to be foreign, IMO. A doctor, a physicist, or a computer techie among us is perfectly capable of writing a fairly lengthy passage in English, which most of the readers unfamiliar with their field would understand no better than if it was written in a foreign language. And the same thing will happen, I believe; readers who can't understand the work will not be impressed by it.

Now, of course, depending on what you are trying to achieve with your work you may or may not be concerned about the average person not appreciating it.

Wot is forin?

Wolk's points are very well made. However, if the sole criterion of style is to assuage the ignorant or lazy reader then, over time, vocabulary must shrink. If I cannot have my madamoiselle say 'Certainment, Monsieur,' then nor must my English lounge lizard refer to a passing beauty as calipygous or my teacher introduce a wannabe as a neophyte. You have to remember that American is a totally foreign language to me but I still make my characters speak in it sometimes. I am not sufficiently racialist to discriminate between my American and, say, French characters in this way. Although, of course, the reader who is not fluent in other languages must be given clues. For example, were I to have an American character say 'I'll have a regular beer,' then I might, for the benefit of English speakers, have another character respond: 'And how often will you need this beer,' to clarify that the English word is different: 'ordinary'. Another way to do things, which I rather like, is whar Hemmingway does with some of his revolutionary Spaniards in For Whom the Bells Tolls, where English words are used to convey Spanish idiom; hard to do but, in that case, very effective. 'I piss in the milk of your mother's engine' lol.

Perhaps American dictionaries don't have foreign words and phrases in them (there is perhaps evidence for this in some of the President's recent utterances!!) but English dictionaries most certainly do: ceteris paribus, a fortiori, bon mot, schadenfreude, cha, etc.

Showing erudition is not the same a being a pretentious cunt, IMHO.