The Use of Foreign Language in Writing (Patreon)

The idea of writing a story using a foreign language as a device within that story has intrigued me for a very long time.  When I was younger, I majored in English, and I used to be a grammar nazi, mercilessly pointing out the misspellings and misplaced commas of every chat message that ever came my way.  As I've grown older, -- and thanks largely to the fact that fighting against the online cataclysm of grammatical dereliction proved ultimately futile -- my perspective on language in general has shifted to the point where now I believe it only serves the purpose of communication, and so long as you have achieved that, so long as your readers or listeners understand the message you are trying to convey, no matter how poor your technical grasp of the language, you are doing it well.  Now, writing as an art form carries with it an entirely different set of requirements, but this new perspective on language and its rapid evolution over time has struck me with a certain sense of fascination.

One of my good friends sent me a story he wrote awhile back.  It was a sweet, romantic piece that centered around a poem written in Spanish.  Roughly a third of the story, IIRC, was in Spanish, as one of the characters recited a poem that the narrator didn't fully understand.  As someone who doesn't know much Spanish, I empathized with the narrator, but there was another level to it as well, because I was also the reader of the story, and with so much of the page being taken up by a foreign language, entire paragraphs I simply had to skip because they meant nothing to me, it made me feel like, without knowing Spanish, I was missing out on a critical part of the story, whether that was true or not.

I liked the story, but the sheer volume of foreign words contained therein gave me the sense that my experience would have been enriched by simply knowing what the words of the poem meant.  Simply looking up the translation, however, wasn't enough, because, particularly in poetry, there's a certain artistry to the USE of the language that is lost on a non-fluent speaker.  Words do not always have clear definitions that translate cleanly from one language to another, and one contextual meaning that can be discerned only from examining the entire sentence at once might be confused for another.

Furthermore, going out and learning a brand new language is a monumental task, one that cannot be reasonably expected of anyone without a true passion for the language, so I view the inclusion of a foreign language in writing to be a significant challenge for an author.  You are basically deciding to include words that you know will largely mean nothing to a majority of your readers.  Which raises the question, should you include them at all?

Now, from the start, with God Slayers, I'm already taking liberties with language.  Given the setting of Kuserra and its location, none of my characters would be speaking English.  They would have no contact with Earth or with humans or any access to any languages that originated from our solar system.  However, I am a native English speaker.  I've dabbled in Spanish and German, and I'm currently learning Japanese, but English is the only language I can claim to be fluent in.  Therefore, it is the only language I can use to express my ideas and thoughts and to tell my stories, so I have to use it to represent the language Kiva and Kiera are speaking, or the story will not exist. The language being represented by English, however, is not the only language people can speak in Kiva's world.  There's a second language, and I struggled with how to represent that language in the story for a very long time before I decided to represent it with Japanese.

There were, of course, a number of options I could have picked. I could have chosen to represent both languages in English, and simply denoted them by font or color of word balloon, or a number of other distinctions, but personally, I find that is often confusing to follow, and I hate fonts.

I guess the point I'm trying to get at is that I recognize not everyone who reads my comic is going to know how to read Japanese. In fact, most people probably won't. So my goal is to include a foreign language to represent my fictional foreign language without making my readers feel like they are missing anything important. For now, and probably for a good long while yet, I will probably find myself limited to interjections and other non-essential parts of speech that are completely supplementary to the context, but in the future, as I stretch my legs and creativity a bit, I may decide to bring it in a little more artfully, framed by a context that makes sense, even if the specific words do not.  The last option I'm leaving open to myself is just translating the text on the page, so that my audience isn't left out of the loop when anything important is said.