Characters' first language vs foreign country

LisaMC said:

Hello,

My characters are from one of the Scandinavian countries, Norway. However, I don't speak Norwegian and my story is in English. Would this hurt the realism of the story? Is it ok that my story takes place in Norway and my characters speak English?

Thanks for your help!

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Hmmmm. I guess it depends on your intended audience.

However, no matter the audience, I think it would make a better book to include at least some Norwegian lingo - for believability, authenticity, and realism.

I think it's okay that your characters speak English, but I also think you need to interject some of the Norwegian language.

LisaMC said:

My intended audience are English speakers/ Americans.
I considered including some Norwegian words but I wasn't sure if my audience would understand those. My characters' names and last names are quite Norwegian though, as well as the places and the cultural aspects of the story.

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You can use words which are obvious in context. The equivalent of hello, goodbye, thankyou and please tend to be obvious, just from where they're placed in a sentence.

But when I face that issue, I translate entirely into English. The only exceptions are words which translate poorly (one word translating to a sentence or similar).

Unless your story is Norway-centric, and unless you really want a Norwegian print on it, I think it's quite alright to not write anything in Norwegian. Regardless, I think personally that you should avoid a mix of Norwegian and English in any case - if you have an English novel with a Norwegian setting, it will be just that.

Then again, if you're having a Norway-centric story, you might want to wash in a few Norwegian elements, to just give it extra direction. Speak of the fjords or something, or how they keep running over the border into Sweden for cheap food.

Also, think about all those stories you've read in translation. You take Chekhov's Lady with the Dog. Although the story takes place in Yalta and the MC's name is Dmitri Gurov, once translated into English, he magically speaks English. Think of your story as a translation.

<i>Think of your story as a translation.</i>

I was thinking the same thing... just throw a few "yahs" in there to keep it real.

Really, though, if you adding convincing detail about place and customs helps, and avoiding obvious English dialect and style that a Norwegian would be unlikely to use.

It's probably a given that your characters are speaking Norwegian unless you specifically say so in narration. The English is just to the audience's benefit. Think of that Disney version of Tarzan. At first the characters are speaking in grunts, but then shift into English. We assume they are still speaking in grunts, but that would get annoying for the audience, wouldn't it?

When I'm writing a character who is speaking in Indonesian, I write their dialogue mostly in English. However, there are always a few words that don't translate, or just work better in the native language, and I tend to leave these in the original language.

In Indonesia, bule is the universal term for a white foreigner, so my Indonesian character might say, "These bules don't know what they're talking about!" or refer to someone as "my bule friend." The direct translation, albino, just doesn't work.

Also there are a few things that have names in Indonesian but not in English (rambutans, bajajs, tokos, ojeks to name a few). Picture your Norwegian characters walking along the coast exclaiming, "I love the deep glacial channels flooded with ocean water! They're lovely this time of year." They would just call 'um fjords.

An English speaker who lives in Norway for a long time will usually have a good idea which words are "untranslate-able" because they will incorporate these words into their spoken English, even if they never learn much Norwegian. If you can find one of these to tweak your prose, do so by all means!

Cybernaught said:

The English is just to the audience's benefit. Think of that Disney version of Tarzan. At first the characters are speaking in grunts, but then shift into English. We assume they are still speaking in grunts, but that would get annoying for the audience, wouldn't it?

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I agree, the desire for most fictional writers is to tell a story, not to make your audience decipher a new language to them. You are obviously writing for an audience so it needs to be in their language, it is of course absolutely appropriate to flavor it with some nuances that help ground it in the actual language they are speaking. Just don't over do it with native terms/words. Take "Shogun" for instance, it's a large book at around 1000 pages. I read a little over half of it and then had to stop due to life demands but couldn't get back into it as the author forces you to learn some Japanese words as you read (not providing any dictionary at the back), so when I returned I had forgotten most and could no longer fully understand the story. This was a number of years ago so online Japanese to English dictionaries could probably help now, but then again I can't look them up while I'm riding the train to work.

I'm currently reading a collection of short stories about Mexico. It is mostly works that are translated from Spanish to English. The small smattering of Spanish that is used makes the stories most interesting, but anything more than a three or four word sentence seems a bit wordy. For an interesting look at a writer, who does this very well, take a look at Junot Diaz in Drown. The Spanish is very limited, but most conducive to the stories. Anymore than a trace and you might send the reader running for a bi-lingual dictionary, when they should still be reading.

Henri Bauholz said:

Anymore than a trace and you might send the reader running for a bi-lingual dictionary, when they should still be reading.

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Exactly!

LisaMC said:

After working on my story for a couple of weeks, I began to wonder how can one explain the fact that the characters are speaking English when clearly they are in another country

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That is not a problem at all. Not at all. Read Memoirs of a Geisha, for a recent and obvious example. Writers set books/stories in foreign countries, with foreign characters, all the time. The reader does not think the characters are somehow speaking English in Japan or Norway or wherever; the reader assumes the characters are speaking Japanese or Norwegian or whatever. In other words, the reader assumes that the author has translated the conversation from the original Japanese or Norwegian into English.

Putting some "Norwegian-isms" into it would not be a bad idea. For examples, look at Memoirs of a Geisha and any other book (novel or memoir) you can think of that's set in another country but written in English. There's a whole crop of memoirs set in France and Italy, for example--take a look at those. You'll see characters saying things like, "Monsieur Martin, what on earth are you doing" or "Akiko-san, what on earth are you doing"--it's very common for the terms of address (i.e. monsieur, X-san, etc.) to be left in the original language. Ditto terms for local food, if the word is also known in English or you explain what the food is the first time you use the term. For example, if your story were in France and people were drinking a "kir royale," you would just call it a "kir royale" (perhaps putting it in italics) and then find a natural-sounding way of letting the reader know that it's champagne mixed with blackcurrant syrup. Anyway, don't worry--just read books like those mentioned above and you'll see how it's done.

Henri Bauholz said:

I'm currently reading a collection of short stories about Mexico. It is mostly works that are translated from Spanish to English. The small smattering of Spanish that is used makes the stories most interesting, but anything more than a three or four word sentence seems a bit wordy. For an interesting look at a writer, who does this very well, take a look at Junot Diaz in Drown. The Spanish is very limited, but most conducive to the stories. Anymore than a trace and you might send the reader running for a bi-lingual dictionary, when they should still be reading.

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Yes, exactly. The ideal approach is to use a smattering of local words for color, but keep it 99.9% in English. Something written in English but ostensibly happening in a foreign language (e.g. the Norwegian conversations) should read like an excellent translation, so that short story collection you have (can you post the title?) might be a good example for the OP.

Ulee_Lhea said:

In Indonesia, bule is the universal term for a white foreigner, so my Indonesian character might say, "These bules don't know what they're talking about!" or refer to someone as "my bule friend." The direct translation, albino, just doesn't work.

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That's neat! And that's exactly what I would do, too--pick certain interesting and quasi-untranslateable words to keep in the local language. ("Bule" is translateable, technically, since it means albino, but "albino" just doesn't have the flavor--i.e. the same connotation--as the Indonesian word.) Also words that translate, but only clumsily. Basically, just use your judgment on what to keep in the original language, keeping in mind that you want to use as much English as possible.

Ulee_Lhea said:

Picture your Norwegian characters walking along the coast exclaiming, "I love the deep glacial channels flooded with ocean water! They're lovely this time of year." They would just call 'um fjords.

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I agree. Don't use Norwegian words where English would do, but do where English wouldn't. If they're 'translated' into English most of the time, it's not worth using Norwegian for "hello" and "goodbye", or playing up the accent; it's quite jarring, and if overdone gets annoying very quickly. If it were originally in Norwegian, those words would be translated too. It starts to look a bit comicbook-esque: a character speaks English for every word except the really easy ones and you start to wonder why an ESL (English as a Second Language) character knows "Deoxyribonucleic acid" but not "hello".

ideagirl said:

...Writers set books/stories in foreign countries, with foreign characters, all the time. The reader does not think the characters are somehow speaking English in Japan or Norway or wherever...

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Clarification: The intelligent ones shouldn't think that . Other people...