Implicitely conveying characters speaking in a foreign language

[jack]

I was recently rereading some of the Hornblower books, and I noticed that when he was talking to a French fisherman and asking in French about the progress of something-or-other, he asked if it "marches slowly", which I thought was a fascinating approach to conveying foreign dialogue in your native language.

If you want to have characters speaking a foreign language common approaches include:

• Say that they spoke in the foreign language, and giving the dialogue in English
  
• Use a different quoatation-mark style (or even a different font)
  
• Throw in a few "mon ami" and "bonjour" into the dialogue to give the flavour
  
• Give the dialogue untranslated, but include enough translation in the text to give the meaning (this is common with classical allusions)
  
• Give the untranslated dialogue and include a footnote translation
  
• Give the untranslated dialogue, and assume the reader will understand all/enough
  

All of these do fairly well. But I thought C. S. Forester's example was interesting because it made the English seem slightly stilted to give the impression of Hornblower speaking French imperfectly. Of course, I don't know if: the phrasing was perfectly normal and I imagined it; or it was chosen deliberately to include "march" which exists in English, but to remind us of the more-common word in the French translation to give the impression of speaking in french; or it's deliberately stilted, as if translated mechanically from _french_ to _english_ in order to give the impression of Hornblower speaking french _imperfectly_.

Comments

[simont]

or it was chosen deliberately to include "march" which exists in English, but to remind us of the more-common word in the French translation to give the impression of speaking in french

That was certainly the first thing I thought of when I read your first paragraph, before reading any of your list of possibilities.

Another interesting case study for this is James Clavell's novel Shogun, which follows a sixteenth century Englishman who has attempted an ambitious sea voyage, lands in feudal Japan, and gets caught up in (among other things) the local politics. Of course he has to learn Japanese from scratch, and this is important to the plot in various ways throughout (because of the effects of vital conversations having to take place through less than perfectly trustworthy and/or competent interpreters, because of the difficulty of acquiring teaching materials, because of some inventive and unpleasant attempts to create incentives for him to learn, etc). As the book progresses, the means of reporting conversations in Japanese gradually shifts. Initially (when he's just washed ashore and understands nothing) we're just given text written in Japanese (romanised, thank goodness) without translation. Then once he begins to learn we get Japanese text in quotes followed by a translation, which nicely conveys what it must be like in his head (you hear it, but it takes you a moment to figure it out). A bit later still he's just about self-sufficient if the people talking to him use short words and simple sentence structure, and then the text switches to writing the conversation in English with the sentence structure mimicking that lack of fluency, and then gradually gets better as he improves further. Meanwhile, when the viewpoint switches and we get conversations in Japanese between already-fluent speakers, it's all written in fluent English. But when Japanese conversations are written in English, the text will often throw in untranslated Japanese words (either simple things like "yes", "no" and "I don't understand", or nouns that have no convenient one-word translation in English anyway) and trust the reader to understand them as a result of all the exposure to them in the language-learning parts of the novel.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I should probably read that.

I'm reminded of the bit in Captain Corelli's Mandolin where a British pilot crash-lands on a Greek island, and tries to communicate using the ancient Greek he learned at school. This is rendered as Middle English. As he picks up more of modern Greek, his speech evolves into Shakespearean and then modern English.