Multilingual Dialogue in Literature

Say a character in a story knows two languages, for example English and French. Most of his dialogue is in English, but he has conversations in French sometimes. Since the reader probably doesn't know both languages, it would be harsh to just put both languages out there and expect the reader to use a translator or something. At the same time, however, using one language to represent another while saying it's another language (ex: "he said in french: what the hell") is like using a white actor to play a Japanese samurai (it's unprofessional).

So how have writers reconciled this predicament? I can't think of any novels that contain such dialogue or plot devices. However, I'm sure such things are commonplace for writers in multilingual countries.

You've basically listed both schools of thought on the subject. It really boils down to how much you expect from your audience. Hemingway wrote dialogue in English and just expected people to remember that because the scene was set in one place or another that the conversations taking place were in the language of the land, unless otherwise noted. Joyce put in fucking Romanian jokes and said fuck you.

A good device would be a footnote with an approximate translation. It's what I'd do if I was in the position described in your post.

It would be unnecessary to the polyglot reader, but gives a chance to the non-speaker to understand the meaning of foreign phrases. It also would mean not having to directly translate, as in your example. This would be more professional, as you said as well.

I was reading McCarthy recently and he left dialogue in Spanish. Just finished Taipei, and Lin chose only to say in English, "she said in Taiwanese" or whatever.

Many of the authors that this board loves expect you to be fluent in at least Latin to get their jokes. Reading Nabokov or Joyce without knowing the classics is like watching a movie without sound. Those fuckers make puns in nine languages without any cue it's happening. Then you've got scifi/fantasy books that tend toward the opposite because no one else is Tolkein, about to make up languages, and it's almost impossible to accurately portray linguistic variation in a full world.

You've brought up a good question with many answers

Julio Cortázar was an argentinian writer that lived most of his life in France. In Rayuela half of the dialogues are written in spanish and the other half in french.

Just leave it in the language; Joyce's original readers figured it out, and they didn't have google translate

read A Farewell to Arms

In the original version of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the the story is told in Russian but many of the aristocracy spoke in French, and French was used. This relented both the historical reality of the Russian nobility being Francophiles to the point that many even lost the ability to speak Russian, and was used in the book to represent artifice and superficiality while characters speaking in Russian meant authenticity and realness.
In the history of literature it's more or less true that the vast majority of people who would be engaging in it, being as they had the money and resources, were almost universally multilingual. Among the elites of of society its really only in America, Britain to a lesser extent that monolingualism became common.
I know my copy of Copleston's History of Philosophy doesn't translate the Greek or Latin and often not the French or German either since it's assumed that anybody who would be wanting to read such a thing would surely be educated in Greek and Latin at the very least.

You know John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Munro, John Quincy Adams, and both Roosevelts all spoke fluent French. 12 presidents have be fluent in both Latin and Greek.

Examples of books that include a ton of untranslated language are Name of the Rose (tons of Latin) and Danielewski's The Familiar. The latter includes languages in different scripts ( eg chinese characters) as well, and the author has stated he doesn't expect readers to translate by themselves. He wants us to experience the same confusion and lack of understanding they would feel if they heard it on the streets.
Personally I think leaving important information untranslated is kind of a dick move.

I think I've seen authors navigate this by mentioning it the first time but putting the foreign dialogue in italics or square brackets so it's "flagged" for the reader that it's in a different language.

I like watching TV or movies with subtitles.

whats a good way to sort of transfer this to writing?

>A good device would be a footnote with an approximate translation.
How do authors format their footnotes?

I've never seen it done.

Read infinite jest my friend. You will learn much of footnotes.

Thanks for the recommendation pham.

Thank you for thanking me buckaroo

Another aspect of this question would be how to write in different dialects of a language. Take Faulkner's characters, who all speak noticeably different English. His southern black characters speak and think in their vernacular. His books would be lies if they didn't

I'd say it's more "authentic" to use the language at that would be used in the situation, if you are writing a realist piece, if you actually know those languages that is. Having somebody else translate something in from English into another language to just drop into a text is just obnoxious and serves no real purpose.

Another reason for having multi language writing is that different languages have different features, either inherently grammatical or in relation to the culture in which they are used, which is lost in translation, and can bring a subtleness which can't be conveyed in a different language. After all that's why doing good translations is difficult and people endlessly argue over translation.
Here's a small, simple example with English and French; in French there is two different words that are used for the second person pronoun, were we only have one, 'you'. No matter who you talk to, you always say you if you are talking to them; 'do you want something to eat?', 'would you like to leave?' Etc. But in French they have separate registers to indicate different levels of formality. When you talk to family members, close friends, children, people that are under you in your company or military you use 'tu' as the second person pronoun, but if you are talking to a stranger or causal associate, an elderly person, your boss etc, you use 'vous'. Vous also gets used as a plural second person pronoun, which English doesn't really have, we just awkwardly say 'you guys', 'y'all', or 'yous'. To some degree French speakers sometimes silently fret over whether to use vous or tu when talking to somebody, as to not come off either overly familiar or too distant. A lady might be put-off if you tu her too quickly, it's not particularly gentlemanly. The switch from one to the other could be seen as an important marker of growing familiarity or a change in a power dynamic between two people. English used to have this distinction, we had both 'ye, you, your', which was our formal register like French's 'vous', and we had the causal 'thou, thee, thy', like French's 'tu, toi, te'. So hopefully this shows a linguistic feature which, since it had no equivalent in English would just be totally lost in translation. This is a pretty small example and really is just the tip of the iceberg so if an author knew a couple languages and really wanted to convey a specific scene in a way that was authentic to the culture it is depicting, using the language of the culture is absolutely necessary for portraying the subtleties that make the literature real.

That's a part of the reason why people advocate reading works in their original language, especially fine literature, language is integral to a cultural and a work of literature need to be understood to be in the context of the culture it was written to fully embrace the work and all that it is.

This is potentially the most productive and informative thread, certainly the most examples I've ever seen supplied toward a question over about 4 years on lit, and, of course, OP is nowhere to be found.

To everyone who posted here already, thanks

that's endnotes!!!!!
the mezzanine by nicholson baker

I'm convinced that any mention of Tao Lin is just Tao trolling...
Fuck off Tao

Tolstoy in W&P. Eliot and Pound's poetry (but they never even pretended like they gave a fuck about pleb readers)

> Since the reader probably doesn't know both languages, it would be harsh to just put both languages out there and expect the reader to use a translator or something.

No it wouldn't. You don't have to spoon-feed your readers. You're not going to kill them by suggesting they do a bit of research/get fucking cultured.

I have a great way to solve this problem but it's a whole new approach and you'd just steal it. Read it from my novel that's never going to be published.

I sure hope you're referring to the footnotes within the endnotes

And what is your novel

>No it wouldn't. You don't have to spoon-feed your readers. You're not going to kill them by suggesting they do a bit of research/get fucking cultured.
I agree with this, but wouldn't it be a large turn off to monolingual readers (who happen to be the majority of many places)?

Why is the Spanish one less polite?

Footnotes?

this leads me to believe that you only ever read anna karenina when it comes to russian literature. basically every book about russian aristocracy has frogspeak on it.

>but wouldn't it be a large turn off to monolingual readers

: (((((((((((((((

As much as I despise monolingualism (aka anlgophonicism), I doubt any American/English writers would get many sales with multilingualism without footnotes or anything.

Recommend some books on the Russian aristocracy, friemd.

I haven't even read Anna Karenina, I just knew that was a fact about the book, and also about Russian royal history.