via
http://ift.tt/1Sus72g:
ineptshieldmaid:
bomberqueen17:
Using foreign languages in your fiction.
I have feelings on this.
Much of it boils down to the fact that I am an absolutist when it comes to Point Of View ruling absolutely everything. Absolutely everything in your story is utterly and completely governed by whose point of view that section is from.
It may be necessary for words to be in a foreign language in your story. This happens. It’s important for setting, and can be crucial to plot. But what absolutely governs how this is implemented is character: namely, your POV character.
If the POV character understands the language, then the reader must also. Either you provide an in-line translation, or you figure out a clever way of doing this. (Do not use hovertext. Many of us read on mobile. You have not made a translation available to your readers if they cannot actually access it from their device. Don’t do this.)
Do not assume your readers can understand whatever second language you’re using. This is the Internet; your readers may not even understand the *first* language you’re using. Sprinkling in phrases you got off Google Translate to spice things up is all well and good but only if it’s to a purpose, only if it’s well-considered.
Conversely, if your POV character *doesn’t* understand the second language being used, do be aware, some of your readers may well. This can be a good exercise in suspense, letting the reader know more than the POV character. But be aware of it. Spanish isn’t a motherfucking secret code; this is the Internet.
And I mean. I guess like all rules this one isn’t hard and fast, but c’mon. Sprinkling a random collection of exotic foreign words into your story just for spice is just really fucking annoying most of the time. Make it serve a purpose, if you’re so married to it. But don’t set a story in, say, Russia, with all characters who speak Russian, and then go to Google Translate and look up how you say the word “love” in Russian, and then have everyone use that as an endearment for one another, when the rest of the story is in English even though it’s meant to be set in Russian. Like. C’mon. Don’t do that shit. Don’t use a language just for “flavor”. Especially if you don’t have any particular insight into the language in question.
Use it to enrich your setting. Use it to enrich your characterization. But it must be subordinate to POV. Don’t make your readers open a new window and Google the random word you’re using just because you thought it was a cute word. In a language both of the characters in the scene are supposed to be able to speak.
I can think of an exception to the first rule (if your POV character understands it and their thoughts are in English why are random words in Foreign?). If they are pretty much immersed in whatever language is being used around then - represented by English - but had another language spoken at home in their youth, some stuff’s gonna come up *in their internal narration* that would be weird to translate. Swears, perhaps. Food words. You did it yourself with the chanticlos in that ficlet about meat. but I think you introduced them first as ‘birds’ - another author, or another context, might have pushed it further, left the reader to figure out what type of creature it was, and that might have been excessive for a short fic mostly about Finn, but it’s not _always wrong_.
I can also think of cases where if the text alienates the audience by using words they don’t understand, all to the good. I can’t think of any fanfic examples, but indigenous Australian lit often has this effect on me- the POV characters in, say, Alexis Wright’s books use words, grammar, whole concepts that are foreign to me. Sometimes they are explicitly explained, and sometimes they aren’t - and it’s on me to figure it out.
There are also situations where the POV character’s idiom in language-represented-by-English may have incorporated other languages. If I want to bring my fandom to Geneva for some reason, they’re going to talk about regies (letting agencies) and assurance (insurance) because that’s what happens to your English here. That’s a banal one, but other examples could overlap with the exoticism problem. The way to tell if a story set in NZ is exotifying Maori isn’t ‘has Kia Ora been translated or explained’. It could be explained and still a tokenistic use. Or it could be unexplained and unengaged with because that’s actually a thing that happens in NZ even if you’re dealing with entirely pakeha groups of people. (Not all the time: has never happened to me while visiting, but I’m told it does happen.)
I’m reminded of Junot Diaz: 'motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third in elvish but two sentences in Spanish and they think we’re taking over.’
I don’t think that’s what you’re describing here, the deliberate use of languages one knows and the reader may not. But some of your pronouncements, if not qualified, would end up classing Mellissa Lukashenko as bad or exotifying writing because I have to work to understand some conversations her indigenous characters have. (She does always give enough information that a relatively tuned-in Aussie will be able to figure it out, but it might be utterly baffling to an esl reader who isn’t indigenous.)
Maybe that’s why I’d left it in drafts– because it does come across as Voice Of God pronouncement-y, yes?
Any rule anyone gives you for writing is something you can and should break, but you should understand it first, and have considered it. That’s what I should probably have put in.
If the POV character is bilingual and some of their vocabulary doesn’t translate easily, that’s a perfectly good reason to have untranslated words, but I would argue, really only if the character they’re speaking to doesn’t understand them. (I think I had a bit where Poe realizes that he’s so rarely encountered chanticlos outside of an Iberican-speaking context that he doesn’t remember what they’re actually called in Basic. He knows how to refer to the meat but he can’t remember what the birds themselves are called.)
And later, when Kes is more of a character, he speaks Basic less often in his daily life, so he’s going to have more gaps in his vocabulary, and more words he doesn’t realize not everybody knows.
And i haven’t read Junot Diaz’s novels, but my sister, who alone in our family took French in high school instead of Spanish, read two and won’t read any more by him because he had so much untranslated Spanish in it, she said. She also lived in an area of the country where Spanish was often spoken and could get by, but she found herself consistently distracted by the fact that he often had passages in his books that she couldn’t understand and that were sufficiently slang-y that Googling didn’t give her much of an idea on translations.
Maybe he’s making a choice to exclude people like her, but that’s a choice. As a fanfic author, which is who I was mostly directing my tirade at, be aware that you’re making that choice. Even if you use hovertext or footnotes. You are saying something that you don’t want your reader to be able to easily parse. And many of them will not expend much effort to do so.
(For the record, though, the sister in question? Also never read Tolkien, the only one of us to pick it up and get to the first hunk of Elvish and say nope no way and not come back to it.)
Some “local flavor” stuff is important, sure.
But what I’m specifically targeting is the preponderance of characters who are bilingual and use their second language gratuitously “for flavor” in ways that don’t really seem to reflect how the POV characters would actually understand what was going on.
Specifically there are a lot of characters who are canonically bilingual but who speak overwhelmingly in one language, that fanfic authors love making randomly pepper their speech with their native language when it’s not warranted.
and I have done this, which is the other thing I left out of that original rant. I do this sort of shit! I’m not immune. I may even currently be doing this, in currently active WIPS.
I’m coming across super cranky with this, for sure, and now I’m wishing I hadn’t posted it in my peeve-fueled haze last night, because it’s hard to get the tone of this sort of thing right!
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
