Foreign names - pronunciation vs. cultural / linguistic fidelity?

CamillaRhodes

I read with interest a post below about the use of foreign words in texts - thanks to the OP and those who replied for helping me out a lot already! I'm still in a bit of a conundrum though regarding the name of one of my characters.

Most of the names are Albanian, and I'm trying to choose names which are pronounced phonetically and will not be difficult to an English speaker to read and remember. My key character, however, is (and needs to be) called Triumf. As an Albanian name, that's pronounced Tree-umf, not Try-umf. Do you think it problematic that the reader will be probably mispronounce his name throughout?

I'm also considering having only his mother call him by his full name, and all others to know him as a nickname (which would be what I would use to refer to him in the third person narrative). This would quite suit the character and, though his name is important to the plot, I prefer the idea of not referring to him as Triumf thoughout, as it would seem to overstate the point. The primary nickname contender at the moment is TJ, his initials - I haven't been able to think of anything better. It is unlikely that someone would be nicknamed like this in Albanian, though, they don't really do initials-as-nicknames (not least because TJ in Albanian would not be pronounced Tee-Jay but Tuh-Yuh). The Triumf I knew in real life was nicknamed Timi, but this just isn't quite macho enough for the character, I think of that boy in south park called Timmy...

Basically, I'm not sure where to draw the line between making life easy for my reader (it's going to be quite an easy-reading sorta book, not meant to be too challenging) and being faithful to what would be an authentic name/nickname within this culture (contemporary urban Kosovo).

Any suggestions or opinions would be greatly appreciated, ta!

pickarooney

I honestly don't think the probably mispronuncition of one vowel is going to make any difference to the reader (take this with a pinch of salt from someone who reckons five consecutive consonants should be a breeze for anyone with a primary-school reading level ). Personally I think it's much more important that the character have an authentic name.

I also don't see anything un-macho about Timi - the South Park kid is hard as nails, for instance!

Or nickname him 'Trump'. That's a heroes name, surely?

EileenG

Go with the name you like, you can always have some character mangle it as a way of explaining how it should be pronounced.

If he has ever left the country, it's likely he got nicknamed abroad, and may have brought back the one he likes.

CamillaRhodes

Hi, thanks for the feedback so far.

Pickarooney, I'm sorry to say I disagree with you on this one, maybe it's just a personal preference thing. Your opening piece you wrote below, with the foreign words - Quechuan, right? - I thought was excellent and I didn't have much more to contribute than the other posters on the use of 'chicha', for example. But I have to admit, if I was reading your novel all the way through, and your shamen character was a key character, it would bother me not having a clue how to pronounce his name.

I'll give you an example; I just finished a book called Bel Canto, quite a light page-turner sorta thing, which is set in Peru and featured a number of Quechuan speakers. However, they'd all been given easy-to-pronounce Spanish names, e.g. Hector, Carmen etc. Now, this may be stretching veracity a little, if these guys were meant to be from untouched villages in the jungle. But it certainly made the book easy to read. On the other hand, one of the leads in it was a Japanese guy called Gen. I spent the whole novel wondering whether I should be pronouncing it "Ghen" i.e. with a hard G or "Jen". I think it created a kinda gap between me and the Gen character, made it a little harder to connect with him.

Maybe I'll go with Eileen's suggestion of having someone mangle the pronunciation within the opening chapters, so it can be corrected. He hasn't been out of the country, so wouldn't have picked up the nickname elsewhere, though he does have a close relationship with an American, who possibly could have nicknamed him TJ...

I'll think more about it. Any other suggestions would be great! Thanks a mil!

pickarooney

For what it's worth, that character only reappears briefly once more and there are no other characters from his tribe (it's a fictitious jungle tribe, far from the Andes). If he were going to be around more often I would have got tired of typing it myself and wouldn't have wanted a reader to have to struggle with it any longer than was necessary.

In your example, I went with the idea that the reader would just pronounce it as try-umf without a second thought, but now that you mention it if I was aware of two possible pronunciations I would probably wonder which was right....

How about having someone call out his name, stretching it out, e.g.

Triumf?
TRIUMF?!
TREEEEEEEEEEE-UMMMMFFFF!!!!