Hi guys, hope your week is going well. I have pneumonia. Yay! (Okay, not yay, but I'm trying to be upbeat about it.) And since sitting vertically makes me weak and dizzy, I've asked former guest blogger Stefan Milicevic back to fill in for me this week. I hope you all enjoy his excellent post. And don't forget, people, 4 more days till NaNo! Better get back to bed so I can actually participate this year.
So, apparently there’s been a little change to the Proser’s
schedule and I’ve been asked to jump in for Trisha. But fret not, faithful
Proser reader/lurker! I shall use this opportunity to develop my stand-up
routine, a dream I have had ever since I entertained the kids in grade school
with unsavory fart jokes.
Have you heard the one about Stephen King, the agent and the
unpublished author?
*Dodges a cyber tomato*
Whoa! Tough crowd, eh? All right, you heckling ingrates, we
will stare at each other until you learn to appreciate me.
...
...
...
Fine, let’s talk about writing.
Okay, so you want to add a little variety to your novel and
write a nonnative speaker? More power to you, my scribbly friend! After all
spice is the variety of life, but if you’re anything like me sometimes you
don’t know when to lay off the Tabasco sauce and you end up squinting your eyes
and telling the other people at the table that you’re NOT crying.
You might say “Stefan, you extraordinarily ordinary person, why
should I listen to you?”
Well it just so happens that English is my third language
and I am fluent in four and I need to point this out because of self-esteem
issues.
Even professional authors keep flubbing the foreign
characters and the problem is so pervasive that it makes me want to throw the
book against the wall or put it in the freezer. Which I don’t do, because I do
most of my reading on my Kindle and I had to pull a few strings to get a hold
of one, and storing your paperbacks in the freezer makes all the pretty women
think you’re a freak. And then, they post lengthy diatribes on their blogs, making
you look like an antisocial monster, whereas you just want to be loved and...
Buuuuut, I digress.
Well, the thing is,
most authors use clichés to portray nonnative speakers, and that’s just lazy
writing. So, you decided to add a nonnative speaker into your story? One of
those quirky funky foreign types who whisk away all the ladies in the romance
novels, but who in the real world cry themselves to sleep clutching their
plushies with a disturbing fervor (can’t be just me, right?).
Most authors I’ve encountered make the sad mistake of using
quasi-linguistic shortcuts to make up for the fact that they don’t speak the
language. I’ve never been a proponent of “write what you know”, because I’ve
never been on far away planets arm-wrestling robo-velociraptors with lasers shooting
out of their eyes. Making stuff up is fine. Note I said “making up stuff”,
which doesn’t translate to “you don’t have to do research.” With that being
said let’s look at the worst offenders and bludgeon them out of fiction. Keep
those bicycle chains and baseball bats ready boys and girls.
Oh, and a small disclaimer, before we start to dissect
particular techniques. I won’t be mentioning any authors by name. It would be
unfair to single anyone out and everyone makes mistakes. And maybe some authors
have hired goons, and I maybe I appreciate having unmolested goolies. Also all
examples are made up.
Dropping foreign
words
“ Ah, you must be John, oui?” said Pierre.
People don’t talk like that. Inserting random foreign words
to add flavor to dialogue is like mixing caviar with custard - you might feel
all posh, but people who know good custard from bad are going to look at you as
if you’re out of your mind (as well they should).
The above example is especially egregious. “Yes” and “No”
are those words EVERYONE knows. So, there’s no reason whatsoever for Pierre to
say “oui”. The only conceivable instances when someone would say a word in
their native language (to say, an English speaker) are:
1.
It is a complex word, describing a concept (as
opposed to a tangible object) and can’t point at it.
2.
The character doesn’t know the word in English.
3.
The character wants to curse, but doesn’t want
his friends to know.
Not even the second instance warrants the use of a foreign
word unless the character’s collocutor is bilingual. People will try to explain
a concept to you by using the words they know or by employing embarrassing
pantomime shenanigans, like me when I was seven years old and had to go the
bathroom in the middle of our performance of Hansel and Gretel.
I am not saying that people shouldn’t use foreign words in
their dialog, but for me it all revolves around context. If language is a part
of the plot, or your main character mistakes one word for another (or let’s say
has been deliberately taught wrong), then that makes for an interesting
feature. If you want to emphasize how exotic a character is, then make them use
fancy-pants words in their own language to belittle the hero.
Make the foreign language matter , make it show character.
Otherwise you’re just pointing it out in a ham-fisted manner
- hey look, this person is EXOTIC! Okay,
let’s put it like this.
I walk
into a bakery or a pie shop and see a lot of scrumptious delicacies. While
contemplating with which delish pastry I will stuff my face with first a pie
comes flying into my face and the man at the counter says: “See? We are a pie
shop? Figured that out yet? Oh, gee, there’s a lot of pie on your face, buddy.
Get it? PIE!”
“Yes,”
I’d reply before I’d pounce on him and knock his teeth out.
That
one foreign word that pops out of nowhere? It’s like a pie to the face.
I swear
that analogy made sense in my head.
Get the grammar right
This
pet peeve of mine takes two forms:
1.
The dunce nonnative speaker
2.
The
Tetris nonnative speaker
The dunce nonnative speaker is a sad, sad creature. He can’t
even speak his own language! So many times I’ve seen writers make these
nonsensical errors - especially when Japanese language is involved.
For
example: -san, -sama and other suffixes can’t stand by themselves, and yet I’ve
seen it done two times, by two different novelists. That’s a five minute Wikipedia
search mind you. I know where the problem lies though: they treat the suffixes
of -san or -sama like the English Mr. or Mrs. It doesn’t work that way.
The
Tetris nonnative speaker on the other hand? He’s one cool customer. He just
doesn’t give a flying eff. He drops parts of speech like a birthday clown drops
free candy. Much like in a game of Tetris the words that he drops are
completely random, without any rhyme or reason to it. I can picture the Tetris
nonnative speaker avatar standing atop of a tall building, his ragged badass
cape fluttering in the wind while he contemplates which parts of speech he is
going to ignore in his next sentence.
“Maybe I won’t use articles! Who needs those! No,
wait, I will replace the male and female pronouns! Oh, the chaos I will sow!”
*cue cheap villain guffaw*
All
right, here’s the thing. Language has structure. Language has idioms. Language
has... well rules.
Dropping
random parts of speech isn’t going to make the characters more authentic. Learn
which parts of speech the foreign language you want to use is lacking.
Let’s
take my first language for instance. Serbian. Okay. Serbian doesn’t have
determiners. At least not in the traditional sense. There’s no “the” and “a”.
So unless you learn the rules by heart or get so used to the English language
you’re going to have a tough time as a Serb speaking English.
“Girl
want me deliver box.”
Note
that I dropped the “The” before girl and “a” before box (among other parts of
speech). That’s something I could imagine someone without a firm grasp on
English say. You probably guessed the trick, by now, so I better stop tripping
around the colorful handkerchiefs that spill out of my sleeves.
Many
nonnative speakers translate sentences from their native language and the
results can be awkward.
And
that’s where the real nitty-gritty fun starts with foreign languages and
mistranslations!
Idioms
or adages are a great way to have fun with this. Many sayings or phrases have
equivalents in languages other than English. You can look those up and play
around with them. Another example (and one I pilfered from a friend of mine who
actually made that mistake), in German people say:
Wie
mein Vater immer zu sagen pflegte.
Or:
Mein
Vater pflegte immer zu sagen.
Which
can be translated as “As my father always used to say.”
Now, my
friend who was learning how to speak English said:
“As my
father nourished to say.”
Pflegen
means to nourish. He translated what he’d say in German. Does it sound awkward?
Sure. But let’s examine that sentence a little closer. Go ahead - read it a few
times. Fix some tea and bust out those After Eight mints, let’s be all fancy
here. That’s right we’re putting on our fancy literary hats.
That
sentence has a nice poetic weight to it, doesn’t it?
Much
better than writing something like “As mein Vater always used to say,” or some such
contrived sentence.
Here’s
another example, this time in Serbian:
There’s
a saying that runs:
“Navući nekoga na tanak led.”
Which
means to make someone tread on thin ice. Sounds familiar? Treading on thin ice
means being in danger. Well, in Serbian it means trying to fool someone as in:
“The
pharmaceutical companies are making Stefan tread on thin ice because his
anti-depressants are too damn expensive.”
Imagine
all the misunderstandings that could ensue from that! Plot twists! Climaxes!
Character development! Alien abductions!
And in
the end my anti-depressants are STILL too expensive, but you might have a
better story.
Research
grammar and language. See what you can do with linguistic quirks. The fact of
the matter is while people use the same grammar and boast varying levels of
vocabulary prowess, we all have our unique quirks when we speak.
And YOU
can make that work for yourself.
Why?
Because you are smart, sexy and self-sufficient. And you do your homework. But
the aforementioned qualities help too.
Eschew transcription
Transcribing an accent is
really tough. I’ve seen it done well, but those instances are rare.
Transcribing speech requires a firm understanding of IPA and regional accents
and it is easier to describe an accent than painstakingly spell it out.
Do I
endorse laziness? No. I mean, I do sometimes, when I am too lazy to cook and
feel like pizza, but me being slovenly is not the issue here.
Reedin’
traenscraybd tekst iz a paeyn in thee baht.
“Reading
transcribed text is a pain in the butt,” said, Stefan in a velvet voice that
oozed sex-appeal in a vain attempt to divert attention from the fact that he had
spilled Brandy on his pants.
Point
proven? If you really want to transcribe an accent then practice. Practice a
lot.
So, in the end...
It might
sound like I am ragging on people for having funny foreigners in their books,
but I am really not. I just want fully fleshed out characters, which feel like
real people. I love writing fiction, and when you love something, it deserves
to be done right.
I’d
really like to get into how to do characters who speak Japanese, but this post
is too long as it is (but, hey if there’s a demand for it? Maybe one day).
There’s
one last piece of advice I’d like to dole out.
In this
age of the Internet (it’s a fad, I am telling you) and globalization, and a lot
of people speak English reasonably well. So you can do without those little
quirks. But if you want to have them anyway, make them matter and do some
research. Maybe it will inspire you to learn a new language. You’ll be richer
in the end. Let’s not forget the fact that you can casually bring it up during
fancy dinner parties!
“Hey,
do you know that Japanese has a different sentence structure than English?”
If my experience is any indication, they’ll probably just
turn around and leave.
So,
that’s it. In a nutshell. Hope you found it informative.
