What Did You Say?

 

Another one of my pet peeves is when a writer uses foreign terms and dialogue that doesn’t enhance the story.  

I’m not opposed to using some foreign language in a novel. In fact, my recently completed manuscript Not the Enemy uses a limited amount of German dialogue. I had two rules for using it, however. First, it was purposefully designed to enhance rather than detract from the story. Second, the reader must be able to understand the meaning without having to check with secondary sources.

In Not the Enemy, the German words and phrases are spoken by a grandmother who refuses to learn English. Their use provides insight into both the grandmother and her very American granddaughter. I was also careful to provide the necessary context clues and to limit the amount and the length of that dialogue. (Since it is a children’s book, however, I also cheated slightly by putting a glossary at the end.)

The author I’m going to use to show the wrong way to do it is probably not the best example because of the era she wrote in, but it’s the one I most recently suffered through. If it wasn’t a classic by a well-known writer, I probably wouldn’t have finished it.

I’m talking about Villette by Charlotte Brontë. The book begins in England and has an English heroine, but most of the novel is set in a fictional French-speaking European city. The story is written in the first person and is narrated mostly in English, but occasionally it includes long sections of French dialogue. Since most of the French is narrated in English, there seems to be no good reason for the occasional lapse into French.

Obviously, I don’t know Charlotte Brontë’s motivation in using so much French in Villette, so I might be misjudging her. And in her defense, in that era many of her middle- and upper-class readers would have been taught at least some French. Still, I’m sure some wouldn’t have known the language.

My experience with Villette was especially painful since I was listening to it as an audio book and it wouldn’t have been easy to simply skip over the passages. Skipping over them in the physical version wouldn’t have resolved the problem anyway, since there were few context clues and I would have wondered what I was missing.

Either way, the use of a foreign language is another device that should be used carefully to ensure that it doesn’t detract from the story.

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To make the graphic at the top of this page, I used Google Translate to translate “What did you say?” from English to French.