Blogger: Etta Wilson
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Going around town, I notice more and more businesses and ads use two languages–English and Spanish–to say the same thing. A nearby neighborhood grocery now has a Spanish and a Korean section. In bookstores, I see more books in foreign languages, although most have an English subtitle. (What are the poor translators doing for work these days?) A local government official on television was recently discussing U.S. health care issues and said it was much more difficult to devise a system in our country because we are such a “melting pot,” with new nationalities and languages constantly being added. Watching the Tony Awards, I hear words that are either new jargon or lifted from another lexicon–they’re Greek to me.
The kind of foreign words that authors and editors have to be most careful about are words that may cause a reader to stumble or wake from the fictional dream in an effort to understand the meaning. This problem is complicated even more by the passage of time. If you are writing a novel that takes place thirty years ago and your character is eating quesadillas, the setting had better be the Southwest. Now quesadillas are common fare all over the country. If you write, “She chose the blue pongee for the evening,” would the meaning of “Chinese raw silk fabric” be obvious to readers today or perhaps only to a seamstress?
Two recent books that have been and are still mega-sellers point up what may indicate the reading public’s openness to new words: Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert in which the author describes her year of living in Rome, in India and in Indonesia. It seemed to me that Gilbert did a good job of both using foreign terms in an English work and making them clear to English readers, as on page 144 where she describes the Indian Yogic divine secret called kundalini shakti. She either explains or uses terms several times to help readers to feel comfortable with foreign words. The other book is Steig Larsson’s blockbuster, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Although I thought the translation was very good, not to mention the plot, this Tennessee girl still didn’t grasp some words immediately.
Digging deeply into a work means going for just the right amount of detail, and that may call for courageous use of another language.
What have you read lately that used foreign words? Was the author successful in conveying those words meanings?
Have you struggled with how to use foreign words in your writing? Tell us about it.
I read a book recently that used Spanish phrases in several places. The incorrect grammar and using things that were translated literally instead of using the Spanish idioms made it hard for me to keep reading. Then the character did something that made him “too stupid to live”. I didn’t finish the book.
One of my characters is a recent emigrant from Germany. I allowed her to lapse into her native language for a word or two of dialogue when she was very upset. In most other cases I was able to use English words in the German word order to keep it fresh in readers’ minds that English is her second language.
Lynn, you suggest an interesting point about writing the immigrant’s response–he or she would lapse into the native tongue in the more emotional states as in shock or surprise. I hadn’t thought about that!
I don’t deal with foreign words in my nonfiction writing, but I do introduce new concepts which carry new wordings with them. I try to make sure that I give enough context clues that the meanings of my wordings are clear. As a writer, I want to be sure my readers understand what I am saying.
I’m currently working on a series about an Amish colony in Mexico, so I’m dealing with Penn Dutch, High German, English and Spanish. What makes it infinitely more complicated is remembering that one character might speak English and Dutch but not Spanish, while another speaks High German and Spanish and another speaks Spanish and German, but not English. Dialog is loads of fun– don’t try this at home.
Complexity forces you to use simple solutions. I use words and phrases that everybody knows (Ja, danke, Señor) at the beginning of dialog and sporadically throughout to set the language. Don’t overdo it– the object is not to show off your linguistics but to give the reader a clue. Once in a while I’ll throw in an entire phrase in another language, but I always follow it with a translation in italics.
When I finished the draft of book one, I had a native Mexican read it to fix my Spanish blunders, and an Amish person to fix the Dutch. People like to help, and they were a HUGE help.
This is definitely a challenge for me. I have a few Chinese characters in my WIP (based in San Francisco early 1900s) and I struggle with their dialogue. I want them to sound authentic, but don’t want to be offensive by making them speak some type of broken English. I’m really at a loss on how to deal with it.
I just finished reading a nonfiction book on the Medici written by an Oxford-educated historian. His use of foreign words drove me crazy. The author would write, “Cosimo donned…” and then would use an Italian word that held no meaning to me–and the author furnished no clues as to what the garment might have been.
Show-off!
Patricia, I don’t think we see as many non-English words in nonfiction as in fiction. Memoirs or biographies may be another matter. And the time period covered can also affect word choice.
I used the words “pirogue” (pee-row) and “slough” (slew) in my YA novel set in Devil’s Pocket, deep in southeast Texas. Should I include the proper pronounciation in parenthesis as I have done above? I cringe when I hear someone say the boys paddled into the “slaw” or ask what’s a “Pyrogoo”?
JD 🙂
Dale, you’ve got a real smorgasbord there! I didn’t know there were any Amish in Mexico. Sounds interesting. One thing I didn’t mention in the blog is thinking about the possibility of foreign rights and the translation. Your story would really be a challenge!
I remember when J K Rowling’s Potter books needed to be “translated” for the American audience. We travel extensively and have been to Australia and Britain in the last year. English phrases and word meanings are quite different in each country. We even found an English/American dictionary in the Heathrow airport!
There are lots of words in many European languages that are similar to English but with enough of a flavor of the foreign language to help a reader get the feel for the character or place. Using those would help a reader through those places where you feel it necessary to use another language. Also cadence and verb placement can be a big help in giving a character’s dialogue that foreign taste.
My recent read where the author did an outstanding job of using foreign words was HUSH by Donna Jo Napoli.
Of course, I think she’s fabulous all the way around, but she mastered the craft with this book.
I’ve been working on a novel with a polyglot as the heroine. She and her husband speak some eight languages between them and I’ve been trying to differentiate the language by the font–Italic for French, a more upright one for Russian and a flowing form for Farsi.
Not sure if it’s working well, but I’ve also tried to use different types of words in those fonts so they lyricism of the tongue (or not, in Russian) is reflected in both what the words sound like and how they look.
(And you stole my idea, Etta. What do you think I was taking notes on during my trip to Italy?) 🙂
I will say this about Gilbert–I detested the last two-thirds of Eat, Pray, Love, but the Italian section had me enraptured. I spoke Italian to my family, could only think of Italian food, looked at Italian maps and fairly sailed through my days in a Romantic form. The beginning of that book was absolutely terrific because of how she wrote it and the ways she used language. (And I’m sure it was the reason it sold).
Ciao.
Karen, I had forgotten the “Englishisms” in the Potter books. In such cases, some authors include a glossary but that implies that the reader will be interrupting the fictional dream of the story to look up meanings. I feel glossaries are best reserved for nonfiction.
JD, I join you in cringing! Your question should probably be answered by the editor, but you might consider a pronunciation list in a YA or middle-grade book.
Even in the good ol’ USA we have language barriers with just the speaking part of English. I could see where a character could get into a lot of trouble.
When my husband and I got married in Indiana, my very Southern cousin matron of honor came up to Chris (my husband) and asked him,”Where’s that lil’ buoy?”
He had no clue what she meant. Finally, in frustration she says, “You know, that lil’ buoy who carries the rangs?” (By the way she is very educated and has an E.D. degree.)
In context and hand motions she finally got through to him. We have such a diverse culture even when everyone is from the same country, speaking supposedly the same language.
Love it that you brought this up. So interesting.
One sub-theme in my WIP (also common to my other writing) is immigration and the question “Why are some immigrants successful in their new land, and others are not?” Language differences are very important to that question, and I have spent a great deal of time struggling with it. My stories almost all have a California tie-in, and I believe any attempt at “the Great California Novel” must deal with the polyglot nature of our state. Neither of my POV characters had English as their first language. My francophone character is isolated from other French speakers and reverts to French mainly in inner-monologue when emotional to the point of swearing, or when searching for a term used in childhood that has never come up during his adulthood. My Hispanic character is much more of a challenge because she is still surrounded by Spanish speakers (whose degree of English ability or code-switching is a mark of their level of acculturation), and because Spanglish defies English spelling. It cannot be done without the text itself looking clumsy. The key is to gracefully give the monolingual reader enough information that they can understand what is being said in the other language. For Romance languages, the most useful source material can come from cognates or near cognates.
Brian, several thoughts come to mind from your reply above. First, California is indeed the land of polyglot as well as the place where so many original and forward-thinking ideas develop. Second, while I think your have in mind what needs to be done, I can’t help giving a word of caution about not getting too involved in how to use the language to delineate the characters. The plot and action may be a more important guide.
I’m revising my first novel, which is set in Belgium where I lived for many years.
One of the MCs speaks both French and Flemish (Belgium is bilingual) but never says anything in either, as he resolutely prefers English. The other MC is isolated partly because she’s never learned the languages well. The French-speaking Belgian characters throw in the odd French word now and then, but I try to keep this to a minimum as American readers often don’t know French (readers in the UK generally do). I might have the occasional Flemish word, but as the location is in the French-speaking area this is rare.
So keeping track of who speaks what, and trying to convey, with subtlety, a sense of the different linguistic worlds in Belgium (single-language speakers, bilinguals or multilinguals, and the expatriate English-speaking community) is a fun challenge. When I give the MS to my beta readers, I’m hoping to get feedback about how it all sounds.
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