If you wrote a book which included characters who speak another language, would you want to make sure the phrases you wrote were accurate?
How about if you were an editor or publisher? Would you care about accurate translations?
I just finished reading a book in which nobody (except this reader) cared about such issues. It was so annoying that it stopped being funny. I’m trying to find the humor in it by sharing a sample.
I am quoting exactly what is said by the characters who are native French speakers, not what is said by the British protagonist who by his own admission barely knows any French. And I’m not going to bother to write [sic] every few words, but I assure you I’m carefully copying directly from the book, with ellipses indicating the—pedestrian but acceptable—English. At some points the author does use some pidgin French to indicate some Anglo-French exchange, and though even that is inelegantly used, it’s better than the auto-translate version of the “French.”
“ ‘Vous être aussi un sorcier’…she said….
‘Oui, oui’ she said with quiet insistence. ‘Vous suivez-moi. Maintenant.”
‘Pourquoi?’ I asked awkwardly.
‘Nous besoin de vous,’ she said shortly. We need you.“Maintenant.’ Now.”
“Vous elle aidez…Non. Vous elle aidez”
“The ‘opital is five heures far. Far”
“You calmez ‘er. Oui? Calmez.”
“Oui, oui. Vous avez fatigué”
“Vous aidez ma petite-fille” [in regard to a past-tense event]
“ ‘Daniel—Souvent il vous aidez?’ I said, butchering French grammar. The woman’s dark eyes seemed to become more guarded. I motioned back to the cabin ‘Comme ça?’ Like that? ‘Comme ça, et ne comme ça,’ she said, unhelpfully.”
[At this point they attempt to go into a more Anglo-French suspend-your-disbelief exchange. Unfortunately however, the author does insist on some more insertions of French at the end—remember, the French-speaking lady is addressing a guy, except when she’s talking about her fille, above:]
“ ‘Merci,’ she said quietly, ‘Elle est ma fille, vous aidez....Soyez le bienvenue.’ ”
[Next day, another scene. Impressively, there is even more French here, and it’s not quite so bad—there are some preposition and article issues—although not quite idiomatic (I doubt native peasants would be using the literary passé simple in spoken speech)]:
“C’est ma troisième visite à le sorcier….Jules mourut l’année dernière…. Le sorcier, il est très compatissant. Le dernier fois, moi, je ne peut pas payer. Mais aujourd’hui, pour lui j’ai deux poules grosses.”
Hmmm…come to think of it, these characters are supposed to be Quebecois. Maybe my pretty good, but not really fluent, schoolgirl french has not prepared me for Canadians—maybe they’ve simplified things and don’t conjugate verbs in the colonies anymore? I’m kind of assuming, however, given the formulaic clichés used to convey “British” English and “British” characters in the same book, that the author just didn’t check with any actual person about how people in Canada, France or the UK actually speak. And she may not have even used google-translate, as I tried some of those phrases and they came out better….
Of course, I like to be right any language, and in general. I would feel dreadful embarassment if I was caught (in print and published by the Penguin Group) in a solecism, committing a language faux pas or gaffe, you might say, especially against those pedantic paragons of purity of language.
1. If you’re using French (or any other language) have your characters begin a simple exchange, like, “Bonjour” “Bonjour” and then continue in English using your writerly skills to convey the fact that now we’re suspending our disbelief and talking in French; it’s done in movies all the time. (and, I might add, getting more and more accurate. Stay tuned for a blog post on the funniest misuses of foreign language in film and TV)
2. Get a French-speaking friend to look it over.
3. Pay a native French speaker to look it over
4. DO NOT USE AN INTERNET TRANSLATOR.
Spell check seems to work well—the accents in the above excerpts are remarkably accurate—but don’t confuse spell-check with grammar-check or auto-translators; it’s a path to disaster.
5. Next time, pick a language, like, say, Faroese, with well under 100,000 native speakers. Personally, as I said, I would care about the accuracy of whatever language I were using, but if you are using a language you don’t know in your book, maybe don’t use French next time, because there’s a lot more potential for looking like an unprofessional idiot (and even a parochial, uneducated Amurrican) when making mistakes in a language that well over 100 million speak natively, not to mention the half billion or so who speak (or read or learn) it as a third or fourth language.
6. None of the above points 1-5 are exclusive of the others.
Here’s an example of what the professionals do: one of my translating colleagues in Athens took the time and effort to contact the Thai embassy and talk to a couple of people in order to transLITERATE the pronunciation of the name of a Thai film director as accurately as possible. This was for a paragraph comprising the biography of this director and for the poster for his film. And that’s just transLITERATION, of a name, so you can imagine what sort of research she does when transLATING a work of literature.
"And what was this 'orrible book?" you ask...That I am somewhat embarrassed about: it's a Young Adult, coming-of-age series about teen witches. It's kind of fun trash, the series is called Sweep, this book is called Seeker. Not great, I do not really recommend you getting hooked. Come to think of it, it would be very atmospheric if it were set in the Faroe Islands...
