DIALOGUE for CHARACTERS WHO ARE SPEAKING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

 

Ah, well. The challenge of telling stories set in other countries includes how to tell their tellings in English, and what to do with foreign words.

 

An article on this can be read here.

 

I faced it with my published novel, THE VOICE OF THUNDER. My solution was to use standard English and where a foreign (i.e., Hebrew) word was used, I followed it immediately with the English equivalent. Because I was writing for young readers, I felt there was no place to send them searching, to footnotes, or a glossary.  I have seen others use glossaries in similarly-set stories for children, and it didn't feel right. Young readers should experience the pleasure of a story. Footnotes and glossaries are for academics.

 

Above all, the flow of reading must not be bumpy and hence interrupted by the foreignness of the setting. It's challenging enough to meet and envisage another place or time. Let the characters speak plainly and clearly. Save the layering to their ideas and let the flow ride the twists of plot.

The Machinations of WORD

The title refers not to word machinations, but to the Microsoft writing program WORD.

Writers know not to count on its spellcheck to find every typo. We certainly know not to trust its grammar check, which while helpful, is flawed.

But recently I’ve encountered some new bugs. On an R & R, I agreed with the suggestion to change the name of a character. In the past, whenever I resolved to do so, I entrusted WORD to help.

So the first thing is to use the Find function, and then the Replace function. Say, for example, that you wish to change the name Amy to Lucia. Ask WORD to find Amy, and it will tell you it found, say, 237. Then ask it to replace all with Lucia. Next, ask the program to find all the possessive Amy’s, such as in “Amy’s hat” and replace with the possessive Lucia’s. It will find fewer, but some, and you will command WORD to replace all. Done.

Well, not really. You still have to go over every line in the novel's manuscript, because there may be references to the old name that would not fit the replacement. For example, if someone says, “I suppose you are named after Amy Adams,” the line would not work as “I suppose you are named after Lucia Adams.” Then there are the part-name mentions, such as someone calling out “Am...” when the change would require it to be “Lu...”---

Or if a character says, “Amie, do you spell it with an ‘ie’ or a ‘y’?” it would not make sense in the replacement.

Thus, while the WORD program has made it easier/faster. All changes still necessitate a read-through.

But the other day, working on a name change with a thorough read-through, I encountered something I have never seen before. The first mechanical hiccup was that half the replacements were followed by four blank spaces, not the standard one space between words. And worse, WORD didn’t flag these extra spaces. I figured I must have done something wrong. I mean, a mechanical machine can’t mechanically make capricious decisions. Maybe I pressed on something. Who knows?

But then I discovered that in two places, and only those two, WORD simply failed to replace the old name. There is was. What in the mechanical brain of this mechanical beast would make it come up with such mischievous machinations?

Bly me. But it was a good reminder that there is no find and replace for the human proofreader.

The Truth and Untruth of Statistics

"Figures often beguile me. Particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'"

Mark Twain

{ Chapters from My Autobiography, published in the North American Review in 1906}

And so I find myself, having just finished the fifth draft of a new novel for middle grade readers, staring the stats WORD popped up.

Time was, I wrote long hand, then revised and typed a story, only to ignore the numbers. WORD insisted on telling me the word count, but I looked the other way. I was writing literature, not counting beans.

I remember the feeling of diminishment when I encountered writers who spoke about word counts for different age groups, chapter page counts, and output counts per writing day. Everyone, it seemed, was counting.

I honestly couldn’t figure out why, and determined not to write-by-numbers.

Only they are everywhere. And while they say nothing about the quality of the story or the art of the telling, turns out they do count.

In the business of publishing, they count quite a bit. To quote Agent Jennifer Laughran’s iconic post on the subject, outlier word-counts put her in the mode of  “...I am tying a noose.” I don’t want that responsibility. I also want my work to be considered for publication.

Innovative work should not count these counts. But the numbers will let us know how far off the expected norms we’ve ventured, and then choose to do so knowingly and deliberately.

These Stats still lie in the most fundamental sense of not telling that all’s well, or that I must take some drastic action. The readability statistics only sit there, telling their truth. It’s not an important truth. But it is one I  now look at , just as I look at the WORD program’s mechanical (and often wrong) grammar-check at which end these stats pop up.

For me it is about marching forward having looked at all I could know about what I wrote. It means that if a reader calls the story “too long,” this is not a matter of length but the feeling it drags. The strengths and faults lie in the art, not in the craft. The mechanical checks and algorithmic statistics deserve a glance, and then the option to dismiss or heed from a place of awareness.

Phew, these latest revision stats look okay. But who's counting?