Foreign Voices

Today's fiction is increasingly populated by multilingual urban societies in all their rich cultural variety, contends Bernard Botes Krüger, making a persuasive case that "readers need to 'hear' authentic sounding dialogue from the mouths of foreign-language characters-something which mere translations into standard English can never adequately accomplish." The concept of foreign-language dialogue in fiction is not new; many accomplished authors of the past have used a variety of...
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Today's fiction is increasingly populated by multilingual urban societies in all their rich cultural variety, contends Bernard Botes Krüger, making a persuasive case that "readers need to 'hear' authentic sounding dialogue from the mouths of foreign-language characters-something which mere translations into standard English can never adequately accomplish." The concept of foreign-language dialogue in fiction is not new; many accomplished authors of the past have used a variety of subtle techniques to help their readers understand instances of 'foreign' dialogue. However, those techinues have never been thoroughly isolated and examined-until now. Using Britain's 'Colonial Era' literature as a starting point in this work, the author discusses and systematically catagorizes every type of 'device' used in the past, assembling in the process a veritible toolbox of techniques which aspiring writers can implement to enrich their multilingual dialogue.