The Importance of Context Clues

 

Last week I talked about using context clues to understand the foreign language phrases used in one of my current projects. Knowing how to interpret those clues is important when reading a book, but it is also a necessary life skill. That’s why it’s a skill we should all learn.

As noted in my previous post, I had asked several girls to beta read Not the Enemy, which contains a number German words and phrases. When I asked my readers if there were any words and phrases they couldn’t understand even in context, one of the 3^rd graders listed two, and I can find ways to make both of them more obvious. However, when I asked my beta readers what they liked least about how the story was written, that same third grader said, “I just think there were too many German words and I had to use context clues from other lines.” That indicates to me that she understood most of the foreign words and phrases but didn’t like having to use context clues to interpret them.

While I can, and will, attempt to make some of the clues stronger, I don’t intend to eliminate the German words from the book. Hopefully, the “context clues from other lines” will not only help readers understand the German but will also hone their skills at reading context clues in life as well as in fiction.

Interpreting context clues is an important life skill. Let’s look at a simple example. You’ve just met someone new, and the person says “pleased to meet you.” If the statement is accompanied by a warm smile, you believe that the person really is pleased. If the same words are said in a chilly tone or with a twitching eyebrow, they are probably insincere. That may not matter if the person is a casual acquaintance, but it makes a big difference if you are trying to develop a relationship.

I don’t believe in being overly intellectual in my writing. Sometimes simple and straightforward is best.

But there is also a place for context clues.

Translation or Context? Using Foreign Languages in Novels

 

One of my current projects is Not the Enemy, a story about a German American girl living in Illinois during World War I. For various reasons, I gave her a grandmother who refuses to speak English, but that raises a serious issue. Should I include her German dialogue in the story, and, if so, how can I make sure my readers understand it?

For this book, I decided that my protagonist would understand German but be just as stubborn about speaking English as her grandmother is about speaking German. So when Grossmutter says “Bitte bringen Du mir ene Tasse Tee,” Kate answers in English with “One cup of tea coming up.”¹ Although that doesn’t give my readers an exact translation of what Grossmutter said, it does give them the essence.

There are other ways of conveying foreign language dialogue to the reader, of course. At times, I simply use the English and mention that Grossmutter said it in German. This can also be a successful technique.

I have a critique partner who sets her books in Africa. Most of Celeste’s main characters are American or English, and some of the African characters have learned English in school or picked it up from the English-speaking people they associate with. But there are others who only speak African dialects. Although Celeste bases her locations on the real African countries where she worked as a missionary, she has chosen to fictionalize them by giving them different names and languages. Although she limits herself to English, she must clue the reader in that the original words are said in another language. In the series I am critiquing for her now, she has a character who knows enough languages to act as interpreter, so Hannah tells her English-speaking colleagues (and the reader as well) what is being said. Celeste makes it clear, however, that the words are being interpreted. For example, “Raymond told Hannah, ‘Tell the children that we aren’t going to hurt them.’ Nodding, Hannah used the children’s language to repeat what Raymond had said.” (That’s not an actual quote but gives you an idea of how Celeste does it.)

Then there is the use of foreign language phrases without any attempt to translate but yet in a context that makes them flow seamlessly with the story. I just finished reading When We Were Widows by Annette Chavez Macias. Her main characters are Mexican Americans, and the story is sprinkled with Mexican words and phrases. I remember very little of the Spanish I learned in my freshman year of high school, and I have no idea how to translate the phrases used by the characters. Still, there was enough context so that I could get the gist, or at least the tone, of the words. Yes, there were times when I wished I had the translation, but not knowing it didn’t frustrate me or interrupt the story. That’s the trick of writing that way, and it’s not easy to do.

This is not the first time I’ve faced the issue. My first middle-grade book, Desert Jewels, was about a half Japanese American girl living on the west coast during World War II. She spoke English and knew very little Japanese, but to make it realistic, I gave her an aunt and uncle who came from Japan and had never learned English. Unlike Kate’s grandmother in Not the Enemy, however, the aunt and uncle played a very minor role in the book and had children who could translate for my protagonist’s (and my readers’) benefit. Even so, I put some Japanese words and phrases in a glossary at the end of the book.

I wish I had remembered that when I wrote Not the Enemy. Although my beta readers got what they needed from my protagonist’s thoughts and the context clues I included, half of them suggested putting a glossary of German words and phrases at the back of the book. A very good suggestion, and one I should have thought of myself.

The main thing about using foreign languages in novels is to make sure you don’t slow down the story or frustrate your readers. And, of course, it should never be an excuse for showing off. Whether the language is translated or not, its use must be natural to the characters and the situation.

Using foreign languages in a novel should enhance the story. If they frustrate the reader or slow the story down, leave them out.

__________

¹ My German is pretty rusty, so I’m still working on making sure it is correct. If that phrase is wrong, it will be right by the time I finish my final draft.

__________

The 1917 photo at the top of this blog comes from the Chicago Daily News. It shows a group of children standing in front of a sign at Edison Park in Chicago. The sign reads, “DANGER!! TO PRO-GERMANS.—LOYAL AMERICANS WELCOME TO EDISON PARK.” The photo is in the public domain because of its age.

Visiting America's National Parks

 

I just put together a collaborative presentation on national parks for my camera club, and it reminded me how important it is to visit our country’s national wonders.

There are 63 national parks, and Roland and I counted up the number we had visited. We’re not sure we got them all, but we saw at least six with the children and at least ten additional ones by ourselves, either before they were born or after they grew up. While that sounds like a lot, it is only about a quarter of America’s national parks.

I’ve been to a few more because my family traveled all over the country when I was a child, but I don’t remember all of them. There were also some duplicates, such as the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone.

The photo at the head of this post is the well-known Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone National Park. I took it and the following photo from the Mammoth Springs area of the park during my visit there with Roland in 2005.

In 2014, Roland accompanied me on a research trip for Desert Jewels. Roland had never been to the Grand Canyon, and, since we were going to be sort-of in that area, we added it to the itinerary. This photo was taken from the east side of the rim, and that’s the Colorado River at the bottom.

A year ago we drove out to visit Roland’s sister in Arizona. Along the way, we visited two national parks and a national monument. The national parks were both in New Mexico. The next photo is a rock formation inside Carlsbad Caverns, which I call a stone waterfall. The one after that was taken at White Sands National Park and shows a dry lake bed that apparently has a little water in it for one or two months a year but not during September when we were there.

The National Park System includes more than just national parks, however, for a total of 431 locations. We have visited many of the national monuments, battlefields, and other historic sites on the list—some with and some without the children. Although I have limited space here, I am including photos of two of the 86 national monuments. The first is Wupatki National Monument in Arizona, which we visited on our way back from Sue’s house last year. The second is from our 2005 trip to Yellowstone and needs no introduction.

It would have been nice to include some photos of the many national parks, monuments, and battlefields that we visited with the children while they were growing up, but those photos were taken with film. I’m simply too lazy to dig through boxes of prints to find them.

I highly recommend visiting America’s national parks. In fact, any site within the  national park system is well worth seeing. Go to www.nps.gov to find information on particular locations.

If you are a senior (62 or more) or a veteran, you can get a lifetime pass. The senior lifetime pass is $80, but that is well worth the money if you plan on going to several places. Roland and I both purchased senior lifetime passes because we didn’t realize we only needed one. A pass is valid for everyone in the holder’s car when the entrance fee is per car and for a total of four persons when the entrance fee is per person. It does have the customer’s name on it, though, so if two spouses each plan on doing some independent travel, then maybe getting two is worth it.

There is also a free lifetime pass for veterans, which also covers all the occupants of the car or three individuals besides the veteran. If we had realized that, we would have saved even more money. Even so, what we did spend has already been worth it.

Here is a link to the page with information about passes.

Entrance Passes (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov)

If you are planning a vacation and don’t know where to go, check out the national park system.

 

Customs Change Over Time

 

I just re-read the first three books in the Cherry Ames series by Helen Wells. For those of you who don’t know, Cherry Ames was part of the craze for series about older teenage girls that started with Nancy Drew. Cherry was a nursing student and then a nurse rather than an amateur detective like Nancy, so most of the series takes place when she was a young adult. Although Cherry did solve some mysteries, they were secondary to her life as a nurse.

When I was a girl, my family occasionally stayed with my Uncle Lester and his family. My cousin Ann was four years older than I was and away in college during my high school years, so I slept in her room several times. One of the things I liked about it was Ann’s collection of Cherry Ames books, which I got to read while I was there.

Ann went to medical school and became a doctor, so many years later I asked her why she read books about a nurse instead of a doctor. If I’m remembering it correctly, Ann said she wanted stories with a medical setting and the Cherry Ames books were the best she could get.

By the time Ann started medical school, it was already the late 1960s and female doctors weren’t as unusual as they had been. Fiction hadn’t caught up with the times, however.

This isn’t a criticism of the Cherry Ames books. Nursing is a noble profession, and society needs nurses as well as doctors. Those first books in the series were consistent with the state of the medical profession when they were written and published in the 1940s. Although there are no female doctors or male nurses in them, there is also no suggestion that those roles are inappropriate and, for all I know, female doctors and male nurses may have appeared later in the series. Furthermore, I believe those books were written the way they should have been. Even though they were not historical fiction when they were written, they were set during World War II and have become historicals simply by occurring in an easily identifiable historical setting.

I strongly believe that historical fiction should reflect the time it is set in. Many of my novels include beliefs and actions that are not popular today. For example, Learning to Surrender has a protagonist who believes in slavery during much of the book until circumstances show her the evils that exist even for slaves with “good” masters.

This doesn’t mean that historicals can’t give a nod to today’s thinking, but it must flow with the story. A good example is Tenmile by Sandra Dallas, which takes place in 1880. The protagonist often helps her doctor father, and people tell her that she would be a good nurse. Nobody except the housekeeper encourages her to become a doctor, although the protagonist’s father seems to be wavering in his opinion when the story ends. The protagonist is still too young to become either a doctor or a nurse, but the reader has learned there is a medical school that takes women, and we are confident that will be the protagonist’s future. The prevailing opinion among the people in the story is consistent with the times, however.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with books that intentionally change history and admit it, and temporarily misleading information is often crucial to a plot during the course of a novel. But if you want readers to come away believing your historical setting is correct, you should make sure it is.

Always respect the reader.