I have a handy talent – I’ve got an ear for languages. I can speak bits and fragments in quite a few languages, and carry on very short, VERY basic conversations in about four languages (German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Japanese), and pigeon Un poquito phrases in Spanish. And I know a Spanish translator who swears I have a Castellano accent when I speak it.
However, this presents a problem when writing my fiction – I’m frequently tempted to write in it. Say Carpenter is delirious from an injury. And he’s speaking in Japanese.
Only a few readers are going to understand that. Mostly black belts and Japanese Americans.
I put a Russian speaking Russian in my Godzilla story (yes, I wrote a Godzilla story, and it rocks, by the way!), but it was too lengthy, so I’ll be cutting that back.
The biggest no-no is writing in German. One author wryly comments, “Nobody speaks German. I wrote a sentence in German, and I got 50 emails from people telling me I’d said it wrong, and each one of them said it a different way – so my conclusion is, nobody on earth’s German is any better than mine.”
I literally have in one novel entire passages in transliterated Hebrew. I had to go back and re-write it, because I realize, very few Gentiles speak Hebrew, and most of them speak it wrong (Adding a TH sound, a W, etc.).
So… you need to have Carpenter speaking in Japanese, but you don’t want the reader to toss the book and say, “sure would be nice if I knew what he was saying!”
There’s three ways to do this.
- Short words. Limit the dialogue to just one or two words. “Hai.” “Iye.” “Oneshimasu.” “Arigato.” “Dozo.” Always give a translation.
- Put the foreign language phrase in italics, and follow it immediately with the translation. This was how James Clavell wrote Shogun. The big problem with it is that the reader may get caught up in trying to pronounce the words, instead of reading the story. The first time I read “Shogun”, I literally spent ten minutes on one page trying to pronounce the words, instead of following what was going on in the story. So I somehow missed how Anjin-san went temporarily deaf? The benefits are, I learned a lot of Japanese reading “Shogun”!
- Just use the first two or three words, and an ellipse. I included the Mourners’ Kaddish in one novel, and I transliterated the whole thing. I mean, I can say that with my eyes closed. But I’m aware that while the average Jewish reader knows it, most people have never heard Aramaic, and you’re going to be saying, “Uh… what? V’Yisgadal? B’alma? Malchutay? How do you pronounce this???” If you’ve got to…. “Yisgadal V’yisgadash…” and describe the emotions and actions of the scene. Comfort yourself that it’ll be in the movie version.
And yes, I’ve used German in one of my novels. When someone emails me and says I said it wrong, my answer is going to be… “wait a minute. There’s really only one way to say ‘Hande Hoch’!”
Or my answer may be, “Shigata ga nai, neh?”
