6 Ways to Incorporate a Dash of Foreign Language
By Kathryn Craft | June 11, 2020 |
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
After speaking English for soixante-trois ans, I am learning French. This is a particular challenge for me, because while my eighth-grade classmates were flocking in droves toward French, I was drawn to the challenge of learning a new alphabet. So I took Russian, continuing in college for a total of семь лет. I still have the Slavic rolled “r” positioned against my hard palate, forgetting to send it throat-ward for the gargle needed in French.
At long last, I understand the linguistic challenge faced by Dmitri DeLaval, the Russian-French choreographer I created in my debut novel, The Art of Falling. Dmitri: my humblest apologies.
Yet this new experience with language has me thinking differently about the manuscripts I edit.
Let me pause here to ask for a moment of self-reflection. When you hear someone struggling to speak in a language different than the one s/he grew up speaking, do you perceive them as:
1) having an intelligence equal to the sum of their errant syllables, or as
2) someone who is courageously wielding sounds that will never feel at home on their tongue so that they might communicate with a broader range of humans?
Knowing the Unboxed community to be an empathetic bunch, I’m going to hope you answered (2). The people you meet—and the characters you create—deserve this respect.
I breen dees up becoss I keep seen manuscripts wit dialogue ware ebbry syllable ees transcribed ass eet woss herd—complete with unnecessary misspellings. Unfortunately, in what I’d like to believe was a good-hearted attempt to make a cast of characters more diverse, such dialogue comes across as mockery.
Clearly, not everyone has gotten the memo: this approach is no longer cool. Yet if you want to effectively evoke a multicultural cast, how can you pull that off?
Let’s turn to the mad skills of some published authors who’ve successfully negotiated this challenge.
1. Distort idioms. When I googled why English is so hard to learn, the first thing that came up was the vast range, variety, and unpredictability of English idioms. Botched idioms are a relatable way to suggest that a character is not a native speaker, one that Jill A. Davis makes good use of in her debut novel, Girls’ Poker Night, through a secondary character named Skorka.
While Skorka does drop in the odd article now and then, she mostly messes up on the idioms. (You’ll note, however, she has the cuss words down pat.) Among them:
“No, you like the hard life, that’s why you work for the a**hole. Before that, you worked for some other a**hole. You want to hit the head against the wall.”
. . .
“I’m pumping more money into this economy than you are. Who gives a f*** if I speak the language of the green moon mans?”
While the other women sit at the poker table, Skorka gets up to slow dance by herself with her cards spread in a fan, blowing smoke rings and drinking tequila from a bottle. “It’s the kind of thing you can do when you’re a model,” our narrator says.
Davis is an Emmy award-winning humor writer (The David Letterman Show) who could have gone for the cheap laugh, but note instead the respectful way Davis distinguishes this character: by inclusion first (as a woman, she is welcome at girls’ poker night), as someone who moves to the beat of her own music second, as a bottle drinker and talented smoker third, as a model fourth, and somewhere further down on that list, evoked but not specified, is the fact that she’s from another country.
2. Use infinitive verbs. Even native English speakers have trouble conjugating some verbs (have you never had to double-check lie/lay/laid/lain?), so some non-native speakers avoid the task altogether. See if you can find the example hidden among the added prepositions in this excerpt from The House of Sand and Fog, in which author André Dubus III is evoking the speech of Mrs. Barmeeny, an Iranian immigrant, whose language skills deteriorate through several paragraphs as her fears of getting deported grow:
“Will they make us return for our country?”
. . .
“A policeman came to here last evening. He told to my husband he will deport us.”
. . .
“Please, you do not for understand, they will kill us. Please, they will to shoot my children.”
3. Remove articles. While I was creating my Russian-French choreographer for The Art of Falling, I was working with an editing client for whom syntax was a constant challenge. I have mad respect for this memoirist. Since from a young age he could speak Ukrainian, Russian, German, and Polish as would a native, by the age of twelve he was an extremely useful (and the youngest ever) agent for the Ukrainian Underground. Despite some fifty years in America, though, he could not master his fifth language, which he spoke with a heavy accent. Prone to writing things like, “Then army come and bomb go off,” our first round of edits was to simply help me get straight the all-important syntax of any story: who was doing what to whom.
One thing I noticed was that he never used articles, so I used that to evoke the language struggle of my Russian/French choreographer, adding the occasional common French word as an accent.
“This makes sense, oui? You know all roles. You will dance much, I promise.”
. . .
“Do together now, we?” Or maybe it was “Do together now, oui?” It was hard to tell with Dmitri. But to me it didn’t matter; his intention unfolded in the movement. On the tour I’d begun functioning as an interpreter. He’d try to explain something, fail to find words, then say, “Penny?” I’d ask something like, “Is it like a huge ball of energy that moves upstage on the diagonal, hitting one, then another, until we’re all affected?” He’d relax and smile. “Yes.”
Note the implied respect here, too: In movement, Penny and Dmitri have a shared language that is more primal and direct than other modes of communication.
4. Drop in foreign words for flavor. Arthur Golden did this really well in Memoirs of a Geisha by using words whose meanings we could approximate without his need to translate them in parentheses (such asides are no longer flavor, but a full pop from the fictive dream). In this first example, we can intuit meaning from context:
“Now that I knew that Mameha would be spending the afternoon with her danna, I had a much better idea why the futon in her bedroom had been made up with fresh sheets.”
Other times, it’s the thrust of the sentence itself that helps us intuit meaning:
She was a bad girl tonight and ran out of the okiya when she wasn’t supposed to.
Golden reserved instances of explaining a word for elaborating on a fascinating cultural detail:
The futon was for the geisha Mameha; I could tell because of the crisp sheets and the elegant silk cover as well as the takamakura—“tall pillow”—just like the kind Hatsumomo used. It wasn’t really a pillow at all, but a wooden stand with a padded cradle for the neck; this was the only way a geisha could sleep without ruining her elaborate hairstyle.
Adding authenticity to the novel’s need for an expanding, geisha-related vocabulary is the fact that the protagonist narrating the story is a geisha-in-training, tasked with learning these details herself.
5. Add male/female noun references. Romance languages such as French, Italian, and Spanish have male and female nouns that require male and female articles. This could add an exotic-yet-authentic flare: “The room, she glows in the candlelight.”
6. Just tag it. Ann Patchett set herself quite the linguistic challenge in her first NYT bestseller, Bel Canto. Dignitaries from around the globe are gathered at the home of the vice-president of a South American country on the very evening that a gang of armed men rushes in to attempt a coup. The guerrillas are rattled because the president is not there as expected, and their inability to communicate only adds to the mayhem. Rather than bother with accents, Patchett simply wrote:
“Attention,” the man with the gun said in Spanish. “This is an arrest. We demand absolute cooperation and attention.”
Easy enough! But clever, too, as she has already planted a definition for a word she’ll soon render in Spanish:
Roughly two-thirds of the guests looked frightened, but a scattered third looked both frightened and puzzled. These were the ones leaning toward the man with the gun, instead of away from him. These were the ones that did not speak Spanish. They whispered quickly to their neighbors. The word atención was repeated in several languages. That word was clear enough.
Note that Patchett is turning her international spotlight on the reaction to this demand, not on the spoken words themselves. Later, she continues this practice to show individual differences:
It may seem surprising at first, such a large number of people unable to speak the language of the host country*, but then you remember it was a gathering to promote foreign interest and the two guests of honor did not know ten words of Spanish between them, although arresto made logical sense to Roxanne Coss and meant nothing to Mr. Hosokawa.
*Regular readers of this column may recognize the application here of a lampshading technique I covered in a previous post, as Patchett dispels a concern that might keep some readers from buying her premise by posing it herself, first.
Research and respect: that’s the ticket to rising above demeaning language stereotypes. The more you know about language, and the deeper you dive into your character’s relatable motivations, the easier it will be for you to write about characters from other cultures.
Help us learn: I’m sure these techniques only scratch the surface. What are some quirks of language that make for delightful evocations of a foreign birth? Share techniques that you’ve used, instructive situations from real life, or names of authors who’ve handled this particularly well. Thanks in advance!
[coffee]
Kathryn Craft (she/her) is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. Her forthcoming book, Crafting Story Movement: Techniques to Engage Readers and Drive Your Novel Forward, draws from decades of experience as both a story consultant and a movement specialist/dance critic. Learn more on Kathryn’s website.
In a manuscript I was editing several years ago, a student put off studying for the final exam until the last moment and then had to “burn the midnight table lamp.”
Hahaha I love that one!
Very timely, Kathryn, as many characters in my WIP are Italian immigrants in the early 20th century. I can’t believe I never took Italian. I took years of French. A beautiful language, n’est pas? But not easy to master unless you speak it often. Which I don’t, in New Jersey.
It was even worse with Russian, especially during the Soviet era. The only time I could hear it was every four years, during the Olympics, and only then for the two to three words before the voice-over translation started. I was so excited when there were entire sentences in the film “The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!”
One of my all time favorite films. “Emergency emergency, everybody to get from street.” Great post as always, Kathryn! My languages are Latin and French, which truly help with English writing and understanding the derivation of words. And yes, it greatly helped when I went into nursing in my forties.
Yes, a great line, which shows both a lack of articles and the use of an infinitive. Thanks for sharing it, Beth! What a great language background you have. You are my new go-to source for etymology. 😂
It was even worse with Russian, during the Soviet era. I could only hear Russian on the TV once every four years, during the Olympics, and that was only a word or two before the voice-over English translation began. I was so excited when I could access entire sentences in the film “The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!
Love the advice, and I loved The Art of Falling, Kathryn! Amazing debut book.
Thanks so much, Ane! Lovely of you to say so.
I made a beeline for Latin in high school because it was a dead language, which held great appeal for me. But it has been a writer’s true friend ever since!! I have a French teenager in my WIP, and my editor nudged me toward distorting idioms as you describe, above. She’s a politician’s daughter and has a good grasp of English, but using this trick to distinguish her from other characters is working well so far. I love all your suggestions and especially your examples. I’m seeing how you can evoke both humor and pathos with these techniques.
Haha love your reason for choosing Latin, Susan! It would have helped you in medicine as well, but glad it fueled your thinking about language. English is a mashup of French, Latin, and German, and it’s fun to note similarities, n’est-ce pas?
I am very aware of language interpretation when I write. For many years I have volunteered with refugee children. Many of them speak more than one language and find English the hardest language to learn. They are terrified that they will accidentally say the wrong thing (e.g., “you look hot” when a girl is sweating in the sun). One day I was with a group of teen newcomers from Afghanistan. One girl had a pretty good command of English because her father was a translator who assisted the U.S. Army. She asked me a million questions about the real meaning behind teen slang like sweet, dope, flex, and slay. Then she rattled off the five languages she could speak fluently. I told her she was quintilingual! She spent the entire day telling everyone, “I’m quintilingual!” Very proud — and an interesting message for her American peers about refugees…
I love the “you look hot” example—great way to use a language misunderstanding to drive story conflict! Thanks for lending your experience, Anne. Sounds like gratifying work.
I love your opening point. We all know budding writers who need to learn that in spelling out accents, a little goes a looong way — but you nailed the most vital reason for it:
Spelling out every nonstandard sound plays up the nitpicky details, and the reader’s own irritation at how awkward it is. It’s got no respect for the speaker or the message they’re trying to share.
I’ll be making that point every time it comes up from now on. And hopefully I’ll get to show people this list, of how to help a character meet the reader more than half way, like they and we wish they could.
Awesome, Ken! Go forth and spread the word!
Kathryn, what another excellent article! This actually comes in handy, as the protagonist in my work in progress has an interaction with a Hispanic hotel manager. The protagonist knows a little Spanish, and the manager knows a little English, so the conversation contains sprinklings of both, with each recognizing their own awkwardness in trying to convey their message. It turned out to be a very touching scene — at least it made me cry while writing and acting it out. (I often act out my dialogue scenes to get the emotions and words just right.)
It reminded me how my attempts at Spanish sound to native speakers of the language. In California, I was sitting outside with a Latino friend and his family and said, “I’m hot“ in Spanish. I can’t remember exactly how I phrased it, I think, “Soy (or estoy) caliente.” Whichever way it came out, they started laughing, and explained to me that what I said actually translated to “I’m sexy,” and that I should have said, “Tengo calor.”
Another time, while writing an article for WU about acupuncture as a means to treat stress, I wanted to show my relief when learning it was being administered by an Asian doctor, since the receptionist was very southern and I wondered if I would receive a true, eastern acupuncture experience. I tried several variations of our introduction, but found that mimicking the doctor’s broken English was demeaning, falling just short of Mickey Rooney’s portrayal of I. Y. Yunioshi in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” I finally worked around the problem by writing:
“Dr. Tian approached me in the waiting room, extended her hand, and said, ‘你一定是斯威夫特先生.’ I didn’t know exactly what it meant, but I knew I was in the right place.” (It means, “You must be Mr. Swift.”)
Bravo! for hitting another mad skill out of the park. Thanks.
Thanks for sharing these experiences, Mike—check out Anne’s comment, above, for a similar “hot” experience. I love how you handled the Dr. Tian dialogue. Well done!
And I totally want to read that scene with the hotel manager now. Sounds great. And respectful, too, as each is making the same struggle toward a place of understanding.
In my day job, I’m a social worker and work with the elderly population. I have some clients who are primarily Spanish speaking, and even though I speak decent Spanish, I still make sure to have a translator with me when I do monthly visits. I have noticed that, while my clients understand me pretty well, other opportunities I’ve had to speak Spanish with people who don’t know me don’t turn out as well. I believe this is because I am no longer as fluent as I used to be and sometimes speak English with Spanish words. I think this is the danger for writers who don’t speak the language or understand the culture, but wish to include other languages (and by nature of that language, other cultures) in their writing. The character may become a caricature of the culture, and that is really, really bad.
My clients like me (they’ve told me so!) and also speak some English, so they understand me often, are forgiving of my clumsy Spanish, and help me to improve on my speaking skills, but because I do respect them and their language, even though several translators have told me I probably could do some of my work without them, I still request the support of a translator to make sure I am able to completely understand my clients and they can understand me. In the writing world, I think a lot of the resources available to help authors include diversity in their writing are very helpful to also include language respectfully. The website writingtheother.com is exhaustive.
I’m excited to check out this website, Laura, thank you! I’m sure many of us here will find it useful. And if a social worker is called for, I can see why you’d want a translator present—you certainly wouldn’t want to inflame a fraught situation because of a misspoken or misunderstood word.
My work is much more low-key. It’s usually calm conversation about things like knee replacements. :)
Ha! And I beg forgiveness for misspelling your name. 🙏🏻 Wrote too fast!
Hi Kathryn,
Glad you’ve picked up on this rarified aspect of writing. In my recent novel, I take a risk early with this technique, believing readers will pick up many things at once about what is to come.
It occurs in the foreign correspondents’ lounge in a Warsaw hotel and is the first line of dialogue in the story, paragraph two. We know the woman is from Naples and the protagonist is in the process of rebuffing her advances. I just dump the reader into it.
“It’s true of you, how they are talking,” she said. “You love work more than people.”
Hi Tom, love the syntax in your example. Sounds great to me! Thanks for sharing it.
Wonderful post. A sprinkling goes a long way to spice up the text. I’m a sucker for immigrant stories, being one myself, and always enjoy learning about another culture, the way they see things. Children come up with the most original ways of explaining things. I loved An Na’s A Step from Heaven and when the narrator describes her first experience drinking a Coke, she nailed it. That’s exactly how I felt too!
I’ll have to look up the reference. Thanks, Vijaya. Reading memoirs about immigration experiences sounds like a great place to start one’s research.
Kathryn, thanks for a helpful overview. In my collaborative novel set in Prohibition times, there are a wide mix of characters that speak their native tongues (Spanish, Yiddish, Hindi, Italian) and in English. They have English fluency to varying degrees.
We often positioned the native language to be understood in context, or tried to have the speaker speak in their native tongue and then translate in the same sentence, attempting to make this approach sound natural, with varying success.
An Italian example:
“Massimo! I am Massimo Volpedo, of the Shakespeare and Company connection. I know your work, this sly Malacong Dall, stupendo!”
In this case, the “stupendo” seems comprehensible in context. In this the speaker translates himself:
“Pinky, my family is Bolognese, many blondes. But we have many pelle scura, the darker skin, in my family too. We are the rainbow!”
We italicized “stupendo” and “pelle scura,” which I understand is a minor controversy in fiction now, where unusual non-English language terms in conversation were formerly rendered in italics, whereas many authors now choose to leave them in roman type.
Thanks for these examples, Tom. A translation creates an obstacle, so true, although I think you did an admirable job. I also think the fact that you were moving toward an emotional climax in the passage—”We are the rainbow!”—helps the eye push past any awkwardness.
You raise an interesting point about the italicization. To italicize is to set expectation and create a signal that the word is not a typo; to render in roman is to normalize.
To italicize or not to italicize? The decision may not even need to be yay or nay. To be truthful, I should have included “italics mine” for Golden’s use of “okiya” in Memoirs of a Geisha, which he chose to normalize, even though he did use italics in the two other instances cited, no doubt to show their foreignness to the narrator.
Thank you for this. My memoir, “Sitting on the Stoop” about a Brooklyn childhood from the mid-’40s to ’50s is full of Yiddishisms. Some become clear with actions, as in some of your examples. However, when I write a quote and indicate something like she said it to me in Yiddish, my R&C group gets on my case and tells me to write it in the transliterated way you have in your first example. It makes me very uncomfortable. Your further elucidation has served to liberate me and write in a way to honor the people in the stories I’m telling.
Futhermore, as a one-time speech and language teacher (many lifetimes ago,) I learned that people transfer from one language to another according to their level of facility/education. I have found this in my own life when studying a new language, people tell me I sound like the newspaper since I don’t know the idiomatic slang of the vernacular.
This article was very helpful.
Thanks for liberating me.
Oh Janice, so glad you read this! A little flavor goes a long way—and then it can get in the way. Your gut feeling was spot on with this one. Transliteration is not the respectful way to go.
Kathryn, my WIP is a historical fiction novel set in the Roman Empire, circa 30 BC, and incorporates characters who speak not only Latin, but Amharic, Hebrew, Greek, Coptic, Aramaic, a proto-Hindi, & even Han Chinese(!). Clearly, I can’t have an italics extravaganza, but the comments about articles & infinitives both left out or misplaced is gold. Fortunately, there are protean records of idiomatic expressions in Latin (to say nothing of colorful examples of graffiti), which I can now butcher with the occasional malaprop much to the locals’ delight. To say your article is timely as I plow through my first major manuscript revision is an understatement. ‘Cheers.
Yay—I love when the timing hits just right for someone! In addition to the techniques you chose, it sounds like Patchett’s simplistic approach in Bel Canto may hold some wisdom for you, too, should these speakers find themselves in the same place at the same time.
What a great article, Kathryn! Thanks for these valuable tipps which will be really helpful for me. I write historical fiction set in the Middle Ages and in my current WIP, I have Anglosaxons, Normans, Anglonormans and Vikings floating around. I have never thought about manipulating the actual language in their direct speech other than by slipping in the occasional sentence or phrase in their native language, so my Anglonorman swears in Old English, while the Normans use specific medieval Norman words. Your thoughts have given me more ideas to shape the way they speak in order to convey their identity.
Sounds like you have the perfect project for playing with these techniques, Birgit. Thanks for telling us about it. Have fun!!