Foreign words in texts

pickarooney

I'm just trying to gauge people's opinions on foreign words used in English sentences in books. Are they more likely to inspire curiosity or annoyance in readers or does it depend on the context/genre, on how many such words are used or what language the words are written in?

The reason I ask is that the opening of my book features about 6 or 7 such words in the first 5 pages (and none thereafter) and everyone who has read it has been unanimous in that they are severely off-putting. I've done my best to explain each word in the surrounding text, but it's probably moreso the breakup of the flow of words that grates. I'm reluctant to remove them all and replace them with English words - there are no English equivalents and the objects (plants, animals, food, deities mostly) would have to be changed to more prosaic ones to accommodate this.

It might be best if I posted a passage, but first I'd like to see if readers have a general dislike of unknown words or if it's a specific problem with the way I use them.

Any thoughts?

pierrot

Did my thesis on translation of culture specific items. You could include a footnote, or maybe have a glossary at the back of the book.
Personally, my preference would be to leave them as they are, just like you have done. Adds to the exoticism I think, and wouldn`t really alienate the reader. Whether you italicise them is another question.

Poppy78

Need to see the context to be honest. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't.

blacon9

To be honest, 6 or 7 in the first few pages is well over the top in my opinion.

The last book i read, Da Vinci Code, has a lot of french words and sentences every now and again, and theyre ok and add to the mood and stuff, but you get to the point where it gets boring.

To keep the aura of mysticism around the words, i suggest narrowing it down to at most 3 in 5 pages.
Therefore any reader who doesnt like them will still continue to read the book.

The last thing you want is to narrow your potential audience down to people who like foreign words.

pickarooney

Personally I despise footnotes and glossaries when reading, so I would like to avoid those options. Apologies for the length of the following passage, but just out of curiosity, what italicised words could be deleted or would it be best to just erase the entire sentence in each case? I guess the featehrs and the bark could survive without an adjective... (also ignore the fact that the passage is intensely boring!)

---

The shaman Nkepe'echê looked up into the yellow sky, breathed in the soft, green air and smelled his own death. It was the fourth day of the Vulture moon and the first storm of the season was building. It was a good day to die.

He looked down into his husk bowl of golden chicha, swirling the fermented manioc juice clockwise, waiting for the brown sediment to mix in with the lighter liquid before taking a sip, his upper lip rolling over his lower like the tapir, T'chana, pulling warm air in with the tepid fluid. It tasted weak, uninspiring. Sucking it past his teeth and into his gullet, he gargled and spat the chicha onto the dusty soil. It bubbled slowly then sank into the red earth, drying up almost instantly. The soil was ready. Today, the rains would come.

Nkepe'echê ran his long tongue around his impeccable teeth. Strong, straight and white, his perfect dentition marked him out as a man of distinction. He had no battle-scars and wore no paint. Over the course of his long life he had been fortunate enough to escape not only the jaws of death, but the occupational hazards of blinding and mutilation. Only his soft, white mop of thistle-clock hair gave away his advanced years – almost fifty seasons had cycled since he had appeared in the forest, in the middle of a sky-shattering storm the likes of which was about to break over the jungle canopy.

A thorny xoñi plant grew close to the ground beside him, its flowers like tiny, yellow parasols. Nkepe'echê crushed a palmful of petals and examined the buttery residue on his fingers before wrenching the plant from the earth. It came away easily. Shaking free some clumps of rusty-coloured clay, he snapped off two of its short, black roots and popped them in his mouth, discarding the flowers. His molars made short work of the root-bark, releasing the bitter juices which ran under his tongue. In rapid, chopping movements, he disintegrated the xylem and swished the sap around behind his lips, pushing it up against his palate with the tip of his tongue curled backwards, allowing the juice to seep over the edges and into the cracks between his teeth, before sucking the detritus into the hollow of his mouth and shooting it out through his lips. The mouthwash left a fresh sting which he tempered with a quick gulp of chicha.

Standing up, the shaman felt his muscles go tense in preparation for his final hour. He began to hum softly on his way back to his bungalow, keeping a keen eye out for kindling suitable for a small fire. At the back of his house, the eternal flame, the P'hune-gê, licked its charcoal breakfast. Inside, he took a large woven basket and began to fill it with his personal effects, beginning with his clothes. This small pile consisted of two plain brown hide skirts and a shorter, indigo, kilt adorned with layers of knii-ôleh feathers. The white plumes were tipped with rings of varying hues, blues and greens on the left, reds and yellows on the right. Nkepe'echê could barely contain his excitement when ceremonial days rolled around and indeed had on several occasions fudged the calendar so that one or other festival would take place a couple of days before the date designed by the moon. He loved the way the shorter skirt with its exquisite colours made him look and the shimmery shake his movements created as he paraded around the village. But even on such days he resisted the temptation to colour his skin with the dyes and pigments which many of the elders used to paint their plain faces. A bone clip-comb and a necklace of emerald shards were his only jewellery. He placed the comb in the bottom of the basket now and tugged the necklace loose from his long neck, watching the small beads break free from the torn cord and spill into the container. He covered the skirts with a carefully folded check shirt, left behind in the forest by an errant ndegûi man with skin like rice and which he wore on colder evenings with the collar straightened and the long sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He liked the feel of the soft cotton on his back and the pattern of the pink and turquoise squares against his copper-coloured arms. Next, he added both copies of his book. First, the original, four-page, printed version, then his reproduction, scratched with a knii-ôleh feather onto sheets of paper fashioned from crushed dhôg bark, stretched and dried in the sun. Chicken blood was his ink. He would never know the true power of the strange symbols nor who had left them for him to find in the pocket of the check shirt. His moist eyes scanned the first row of characters, following the contours of the strange letters that he knew so well but could not understand.

I-N-S-T-R-U-C-T-I-O-N M-A-N-U-A-L

He debated leaving the paper behind for the one to follow but finally concluded that if Nkepe'echê could not reveal the magic of the print then no novice could realistically hope to do so. He patted the paper and the bark as smooth as he could and slipped them into the side of the basket.

The twig caught aflame at the first attempt, the P'hune-gê swallowing the thin stick. Nkepe'echê carefully walked the fifty paces to where he had built a small pile of dry wood and pushed the twig into the bundle of cracked leaves at its base, watching the fire form a ring around the bottom of the branches. When the flames had spread to the rest of the pyre, he took up the basket and mumbled a short prayer before tossing the contents one by one into the blaze. A crowd was gathering at the village gate, keeping a respectable distance and silence. Among them, thoughts were forming as to who would replace the shaman, although nobody spoke during Nkepe'echê's solemn preparation. He waited until the orange tongues had consumed the brown skirts before lobbing the bone comb into the furnace and feeding the shirt, sleeve by sleeve, into the fire. The kilt was next, its feathers disappearing with a rush of burnt air even before it landed on the bonfire. One by one, the shaman threw the green beads of his necklace into the pile. They would not burn, but the blackened stones would never be used again. Lastly, he added his bark manuscript and the four white pages, alarmed at how quickly the paper vanished in the greedy flames, and turned the basket upside-down on the already-retreating fire. As the last of his personal items was reduced to cinders, he sat and waited for the flames to die. Now, so close to the end, he began to empty his mind of all the hanging questions of his long life. He had never chosen a woman, never made a child, never found the meaning of the pages or of the dream of the handsome white man with the shining head. He released them now, letting the mysteries sweat out of him and back into the ground. When his mind was free, he opened his eyes and rose. Only embers remained of his possessions. He trampled the cinders into the earth and kicked dust over the small pile. The sky was dark with blue-black clouds jostling for position overhead. Nkepe'echê made his way slowly to the narrow channel separating the land of the Su'upke from the dry forest. He cleared it in a muscular bound and vanished between the drooping leaves of a clutch of khândjul trees. At the crest of a small hill in an oval clearing stood a grey rock. One side of the rock pointed towards the light, through a break in the foliage and back over the stream where it curved back around the small hill on the opposite side to the village. Beyond the stream, the arid fields of the Su'anze people rolled down to the edge of the world. The side of the rock was sloped and concave. Nkepe'echê leaned back into the curve of the stone, laid his arms by his sides and closed his eyes one last time as the first spots of rain hit the trees around him.

The storm was fierce, as coarse and violent as the tempest that had heralded his birth in the moon of the Ocelot, longer ago than anyone could remember. Rain pummelled his bare skin and pounded the earth like machine-gun fire from above. A lunatic wind charged through the forest, shoving plants and bushes out of its way, whipping the dust against the rocks and trunks as enraged thunder crashed in the coal-black clouds. Nkepe'echê counted the booms, timed the flashes visible through the lids of his closed eyes, counted down the seconds until his last breath. As the storm came closer, a cool sweat-blanket of calm washed over him. The lightning strikes were so close now that the clearing around him was lit with a yellow strobe. Behind him there was a crack and a smell of burning as a stricken branch detached itself from a khândjul tree and landed with a squelch on the soaked floor of the forest. The storm reached a crescendo with a peal of thunder accompanied by a second-long flicker of light electricity. A heartbeat thereafter, it moved on through the forest.

An hour later, the rain stopped. Nkepe'echê opened his eyes and looked around him with a heavy sigh. He would not die on this day after all. First, there was something the gods wanted him to do.

heinrichaussler

I personally think that, in your example, it works well.

It holds more authority than putting an anglicised version of the word in; you have a good, strong prose here, and it's not Now magazine you're writing. It's up to the reader to follow the Author's lead at a certain point. Not just this example, but in general. And I think not using the REAL words in this case, would take something away from your piece. Nice job, man.

reality

I think that it gives weight to the passage, although you could slightly lessen the number of foreign words without sacrificing much atmosphere. I'd be hesitant to undergo any drastic changes if I were you, as this is a strong piece.
Honestly, the only time's it grated on me were the repeated use of 'chicha' (but I think that was because each use was quite stark and independant - perhaps you could drop the second usage and maybe if you link the final usage back to the first reference or something, e.g. "quick gulp of the bland (etc.) chicha", it mightn't seem so jarring?) and 'khândjul tree' (unless you give a hint as to what it means - either directly or subtly, I don't think it adds much for the reader).
Congratulations though - and good luck with it.

pickarooney

heinrichaussler wrote: »

I personally think that, in your example, it works well.

It holds more authority than putting an anglicised version of the word in; you have a good, strong prose here, and it's not Now magazine you're writing. It's up to the reader to follow the Author's lead at a certain point. Not just this example, but in general. And I think not using the REAL words in this case, would take something away from your piece. Nice job, man.

You're probably the first person not to tell me out straight that they take significantly away from the opening. Did you by any chance read lots of Dr. Seuss or Lewis Carroll growing up (serious question)?

bakkiesbotha

almost fifty seasons had cycled since he had appeared in the forest,

There are four seasons in a year... I presume he is not meant to be 12 and a half?

bakkiesbotha

The reader comes across these words, such as xoñi plant, their attention is momentarily drawn away from the narrative, then they swiftly decide that they don't care what a xoñi plant is. It's a plant. They don't need to know anything about it, and they move on.

So, it is great that there aren't any footnotes or endnotes as they would just interrupt the narrative even further and hardly anyone would want to look them up.

However, you always need to keep your reader's experience in mind. Do you want your reader to go through the above process numerous times in the first few pages of your book? Is that really where you want their attention to be directed?

It is up to you. I personally think that while the terminology might add to the verisimilitude of the piece, it takes away from the flow.

In short, I think you need to ask yourself what these words are adding to the story, and if you think they are doing an important job, are they the only words that can do that job, and do you need every single one of them?

pog it

bakkiesbotha wrote: »

almost fifty seasons had cycled since he had appeared in the forest,

There are four seasons in a year... I presume he is not meant to be 12 and a half?

Could be the equivalent of 12 and a half years since he appeared in the forest

I loved it. Your image straight off of the shaman taking in the green air is so simple and perfect and you immediately get the sense of place. I personally love new words interspersed- you have to use the authentic words to get a sense of the true meaning of it and I would be the type who would look up something new if I don't get it at first, by google imaging, etc.

pog it

reality wrote: »

I think that it gives weight to the passage, although you could slightly lessen the number of foreign words without sacrificing much atmosphere. I'd be hesitant to undergo any drastic changes if I were you, as this is a strong piece.
Honestly, the only time's it grated on me were the repeated use of 'chicha' (but I think that was because each use was quite stark and independant - perhaps you could drop the second usage and maybe if you link the final usage back to the first reference or something, e.g. "quick gulp of the bland (etc.) chicha", it mightn't seem so jarring?) and 'khândjul tree' (unless you give a hint as to what it means - either directly or subtly, I don't think it adds much for the reader).
Congratulations though - and good luck with it.

Completely agree with Reality- I would change the second 'chicha' and put in something else that infers the chicha.

Also, I'm wondering.. when he breathed in the soft green air- what in that made him smell his own death at the same time? Is his death going to be peaceful??

pickarooney

bakkiesbotha wrote: »

almost fifty seasons had cycled since he had appeared in the forest,

There are four seasons in a year... I presume he is not meant to be 12 and a half?

In Ireland, perhaps (at a push). In the tropics, two is normal, putting him in his mid-twenties. I made him a bit older on a subsequent rewrite but somehow forgot to increase that. Probably distracted by the stupid italics.
For info, the knii-oleh is important to the story, but I think I'll discard dhog, reduce the number of chichas (as well known as 'beer' in some parts) and toss a coin on ndegui.

The shaman uses very specific plants for his rituals, so I do think it important that they be specifically referred to where they do occur.

H. Flashman

No i think they're fine - if you want to create atmosphere stick with them. But if you think there's too many of them or they're interupting the flow there are easy ways to help matters along.

For example in the first paragraph you mention something called chicha and launch into an explaination of what it is right there and then. Since your second reference to it comes so quickly why not use that oppurtunity to explain what it is thus avoiding the appearance of acting like a translator i.e instead of saying he gargled and spat the chicha .... say he gargled and spat the manioc juice ....

weiming

Specifics:

"...At the back of his house, the eternal flame, the P'hune-gê, licked its charcoal breakfast. Inside, he..."

Do yo mean "behind his house..."? "At the back of" sounds like inside and near the back of, but then you write "inside" in the next sentence.

"The twig caught aflame..."

The twig can "catch fire", or just "catch", but "catch aflame" is not a verb phrase I'm familiar with.

"A crowd was gathering at the village gate, keeping a respectable distance..."

You may have meant respectful distance.

"As the last of his personal items was reduced to cinders..."

Were reduced...

But above are just editing minutiae that I'm sure you would have caught on a re-read anyway. Speaking of editing, can I get a couple more paragraph breaks? For some reason this board seems to remove indentation and I'm getting a little lost in some of the longer paragraphs.

General:

I really like the level of detail you put into your work. Although admittedly, I did not enjoy spending half of paragraph three inside Nkepe'echê's mouth.

As far as the word issue that has been discussed back and forth, I simply propose that you (a) read your work aloud or, (b) record yourself reading it and listen to it, or (C) have someone do this for you. Most people are aural readers, if you're having trouble pronouncing stuff, most people are probably having as much trouble reading it, or just ignoring it. The name "Nkepe'echê", while creative and reflecting the character's tribal origins, doesn't really roll off the tongue. Then again, neither does Schwarzenegger, and he did fine.

I think part of what is throwing some readers isn't just the injection of these words, but perhaps also the phonemes that construct them.

I like the atmosphere some of the words provide, but I feel it's a bit overdone.

Your ability to write in detail is great, but I think you could remove some of the less salient detail and shorten the piece, which would also give you more time to advance the plot. I'm very interested to read the rest.

pickarooney

Thanks H Flashman and Weiming.

I don't want to get bogged down in a bak and forth about the specifics, but it is interesting that you understand 'the back of the house' in this way. I'm almost certain other Hiberno-English speakers would interpret it as outside but near the wall but it may be less clear to speakers of other dialects, so possibly worthwhile changing to something less ambiguous.

I think I fiddled with about 10 variations of 'caught fire', 'caught alight' and none seemed completely right. I'll eventually sort that one out.

Respectful distance - good call

Was/were - I literally meant the last one of his belongings but this is a minor point either way.

Your point on the pronounceability of the italicised words is very pertinent. I could make them more 'euro-friendly' but I don't know if that's 'honest'. If I were writing a newspaper report about political events in Thailand I wouldn't change the tongue-twister names to John and Charlie... learning to compromise between what I want to write and what someone else might want to read is possibly the toughest thing for me.

I desperately need someone to point at specific things and say 'delete that' as although I need to cut the book down by about 30% by my reckoning I just don't know what to leave and what to dump. I can't really put 700+ pages on here but if you'd be interested in reading/hatchet-jobbing another couple of chapters, I'd be honoured.

weiming

I have to be honest up front, I'm currently in my first year of graduate school, so I'm a little busy. But I wasn't kidding when I said I like your writing, pass whatever you have on over and I'll look at it.

Although, you should definitely get a second opinion on what to lose and what to keep. I can tell you what I like and what I don't but if I was that good at editing writing, well I'd be a decent writer (which I'm not). See your PM's for my e-mail.

Anouilh

I have become very interested in inter-textuality and the prominence of computer techno-speak in contemporary writing. I blogged about it last evening:

http://moderntwist2.blogspot.com/

You may find it helpful to look at some of the comments posted by academics on my blog as they work in that area and a lot of effort is being put into interpreting the management and storage of new texts. Categorizing them must be a nightmare.

If I find a new word, btw, I just google it and if it is so abstruce as to have no written links I do a photo search which usually reveals the meaning.

pickarooney

Funnily enough there's an entire chapter of my book which involves a cracker-type tunneling into a series of servers and explaining what he's doing to a computer-ilbinarate 'Strine that I need to have read by some who understands nothing of such things to see is it even a small bit comprehensible and by someone who understands much of such to see if it all holds water.

I've Brassens in my head after clicking on your blog. Never a bad thing. i'm still wondering if 'abstruce' is a typo or a self-referential neologism...

Anouilh

I often confuse spellings containing "s" or "c".

Astuce/Abstruse seem to be a tangled web.

Maria von Trapp had amusing examples of the strangeness of English.

If mouse led to mice
logically
house must lead to hice.

I would be very pleased to know more about your book. I'm new to this forum and do not know what others are working on.

This is this morning's find:

http://books.google.ie/books?id=L3B5vPRNldIC&pg=PA75&lpg=PA75&dq=abstruse+astuce&source=bl&ots=gYVx6Y_Nv9&sig=WniftZFi6IRVDjYS_O_jSTH0HWk&hl=en&ei=Eom8Srv2K4_54AbaypHFCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1

As for neologisms, I think they have to be easy on the ear to find a true place, as my effort to generate one last year might prove:


http://moderntwist2.blogspot.com/2008/03/i-must-get-my-categories-sorted-out.html#links

"Exospheration" sounds like a disfunctional internal combustion engine web attack.

pickarooney

Dragging this up for a closely related question in a slightly different context. I'm trying to describe a situation where someone is caught doing something in a foreign country and can only make out small bits of what is being said to her and cobble together some pidgin response. I want there to be a sense of confusion without overly confusing the reader. I've only started rewriting it, so there's a lot of junk in this couple of paragraphs but I just would like to hear opinions on the whole Spanish/English mix.

---

She had no idea how long she had been crouched down in the weeds when the voices finally faded and the torch beacon stopped flickering overhead. She waited for what she guessed was another ten minutes before uncurling her cramped body. Sitting on the damp bank she massaged some life back into her sleeping legs and allowed her breath to settle before making her first tentative steps back on the road. Rolling her shoulders to work the stiffness out of her back, she felt the no-nonsense grip of a strong hand on her arm just as the torch-beam hit her full in the face. Rising panic met sinking hope in a gut-wrenching instant.

In the minute which passed before someone spoke, a dozen scenarios played out in her petrified mind – prison, beatings, pushings into rivers, sexual assault, a humongous fine, deportation and the worst of all – a swift return to Mayo having never seen Machu Picchu. The pair were dressed in approximate uniforms of beige and fawn. One stood flexing his sizeable forearms while a snaking vein on his flat forehead throbbed and his partner glared from under his oversized hat at the trespassing gringa.
"Te vas a Machu Picchu?" asked the chief among the pair eventually. Nancy figured that least said would be soonest mended and let the question pass unanswered. "No hoy trenas ahorita, sabes?" went on the beefy-armed watchman, tapping his watch.

Nancy's mind raced, bumping into walls at every turn. If she somehow managed to slip away, could she outrun them? She could only go in a straight line and would be caught whatever happened. She had neither the strength nor the amoral inclination to shove them into the river, nor a bankroll big enough to bribe the two officials. She had, in fact, nothing but a handful of distantly-related words with which to express herself.
"Esta mi dream visiter Machu Picchu. Chica. No grande" she began, hoping they might pick up something from her face if not her shaking voice.
"Hay que ir con el tren, no ve?" suggested the uniformed slab, drawing himself up to as close to her height as he could manage.

Guessing he meant something about a train, Nancy said "No tengo dinero" thinking ni nada que dar. Perhaps she could sing her way out of this fine mess.
"Da verdad?" said the guard, two words marinated in scepticism. "Sin embargo, tiene de que tomar el avión hasta aqui, no ve?"
Nancy didn't like the turn this conversation was taking. He seemed to be accusing her of breaching international trade bans and she remembered avion to mean aeroplane from French class. Whatever about trespassing, she wasn't going to go down for drug smuggling. Suddenly conscious of the small bag of coca leaves in her jacket pocket she tried again to plead lack of funding and butter the railman up.
"Amo visiter su pays incredible. Peru esta mucho mucho hermoso, spectacular pays Mi trabajo muy muy pour visiter Peru. Mucho felicidad see your country. Please, I didn't know it was against the law..."
The two men, unmoved by her paean to their motherland, conferred for a moment.
"Cuanto tiene, amiga?"
Amiga, this was better. They wouldn't kill someone they called amiga, surely; that would be fierce bad form. It sounded like they were asking her something though.
"Sí, sí, gracias" she said, hopefully.
"Dinero. Dólares. Cuanto tiene?" asked the second-in-command slowly, speaking aloud for the first time in a curiously high-pitched voice and rubbing his fingertips together.

They wanted a bribe. This was it, best not to rush it. Give too little and they were likely to bang her up for cheek, too much and she'd be stranded. Rooting cautiously in her small purse she pulled out a small bundle of notes, something her frazzled mind calculated at roughly twenty dollars' worth, and held them out tentatively. Squeaker checked each bill carefully against the moonlight for signs of forgery and looked to his boss for approval. Commandeering the cash, Popeye looked from the bills back to Nancy's strained face and peeled one off, handing it back to her before trousering the rest. Nodding curtly he said "Que te vaya bien."
Nancy was transfixed, unsure if she had just been nailed bribing a public official or if she was off the hook.
"Vaya te a Machu Picchu entonces" he urged with a gregarious smile.
"You mean... yo puedo... andale?"
Arriba, a-fuсkin'-riba, she muttered as she closed her eyes and walked off, half-expecting a gunshot to take her out as she escaped. Moustache-rash be damned, she could have kissed them, but contented herself with keeping her head down and her feet falling one in front of the other.

meganj

This is my first post in the CW forum so you'll excuse me offering my two cents without anything to back it up

I really like the mix of English and Spanish, I think when you use a mix of languages in a scene where the protagonist is uncomfortable and confused then a mix of languages works very well to translate those feelings to the readers, and seems more realistic then simply translating the whole thing to English and writing about her not understanding them.

To me, the use of another language in a novel or story makes it more realistic and but I will say it never has me reaching for the Spanish-English dictionary as I do expect the author to at least offer some sort of explanation, which you have done very well here with Nancy. I think the concern is that some writers chose to just introduce different languages with no explanation, reference or slight hint at what it might be and you risk losing your readers that way, but I think what you've done here circumvents that and allows the reader to understand what's going on but also leaves the reader a little bit on edge.

Just my two cents

Well done, keep up the wonderful work!