The Mythcreant Podcast 492 – Language Barriers in Fiction
Most people have encountered language barriers at some point in their life, but they’re rarely a problem for fictional characters. And when an author does include a language barrier, it’s usually overcome in short order. Is this the right way to do things? Maybe. Sometimes. It’s complicated. Good thing we’ve got an entire episode to talk about it!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: And…
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: And for the rest of this podcast, I am going to be speaking entirely in droid beep boop sounds. boop boop boop…
Bunny: Oh yes.
Oren: beep boop
Bunny: Of course.
Chris: That’s no problem. I’ll just use my magic autotranslate technology that’s never sampled this language before. And it’s a completely unknown language, but it can, you know, know exactly what you’re saying.
Oren: beep boop beep
Bunny: Oh, that’s a great observation.
Oren: I think I made a good point, and thankfully, now that you have a magic translator, it can translate what I’m saying for the convenience of anyone listening, but in character, I’m still speaking in beep boops, just so we’re clear.
Bunny: This is going to be true for the rest of the podcast’s mortal life.
Chris: Somehow the technology also silences all the beep boops and has audio to create a new voice for you, and we just can’t hear the beep boops anymore.
Oren: Yeah, and if I occasionally want to do something just in beep boop for emphasis or as an idiom, it will know to let that through.
Bunny: Well, now you’ve gotta start punctuating your points with very loud beep boops.
Oren: Yeah, I will definitely remember to do that. We have a history of keeping our opening bits going like that. I think everyone can agree. So today we’re talking about language barriers in fiction and whether or not you should have them or not. Maybe you don’t want them, ’cause I’ve seen stories that have them and don’t handle them well. And then of course there’s the running joke of “everyone speaks Common.”
Chris: Somehow I miss this running joke, maybe ’cause I’m not on social media really.
Oren: It’s mostly a D&D joke. Common is the language everyone speaks by default in D&D for some reason.
Chris: Is it really called Common?
Oren: Common.
Chris: It comes from the country of Commlandia.
Oren: RPGs have it a little harder because they have to actually tell you what’s going on, whereas a lot of settings just don’t say anything, but if you look, you can still tell that the languages in the setting don’t make any sense. Like in Star Wars, everyone speaks Basic, except for, I guess, Hutts for some reason. There are two languages in Star Wars. No, three: there’s Hutt, Basic, and Wookie.
Bunny: And I guess droid, but everyone just… See, I feel like in Star Wars everyone just understands what everyone else is saying, and then the dialogue from the characters speaking in English convey to us what they have said.
Oren: Yeah, it’s real… They can all basically tell what their droids are saying. With Wookies it’s weird because Wookies have names that Wookies cannot pronounce. So it’s just the languages in Star Wars are just a mess. None of them… they don’t make any sense.
Chris: The Wookie thing is a metaphor for how people of other cultures are assimilated into the Basic culture.
Bunny: They’re all so basic.
Oren: I would accept that as an interesting explanation if Star Wars at all explored it. But it’s… Anyway, I understand why people don’t want to do language barriers, because if you’re not interested in them, they are a huge pain. Like they just get in the way, your characters can’t really do anything complicated if you have a bunch of language barriers and they can’t understand each other, so it’s just easier to be like, “No, everyone just speaks the same language. It’s fine, whatever.”
Chris: No, no, but there’s a solution to this. You just have the characters look into each other’s eyes, and then you could describe, “Well, he gave me a look as though he wanted me to reverse the polarity of the deflector dish while eating pretzels.” We know eye contact can communicate anything in fiction.
Bunny: That’s the real common.
Oren: Yeah, I’ve seen that. I’ve seen magic hand gestures. Like, don’t get me wrong, hand gestures can communicate, and people have used them to communicate, but there’s a limit to how complicated information they can get across, especially in short periods of time that tend to be relevant in high-stakes fiction. Sure, if you have plenty of time and you don’t share a language, you could use gestures to arrange the sale of something, right? You could point to the thing and then point to the money, and you could work that out, right? That could take some time. But in a high-stress situation, are you going to be able to communicate “A flanking maneuver over the third ridge,” like, when you only have 30 seconds? Probably not. That’s just not going to work. And I’ve seen stories that do that because the author clearly just got tired of the language barrier. And at this point, I would rather there just not be one.
Chris: The essential problem is that at first a language barrier makes it feel real that people come from different cultures and adds realism. But as you continue, that gets old and it’s still in the way of the plot.
Oren: Yeah. Your mileage may vary on how much of this you tolerate. Chris and I were watching Ark, the animated series recently, and the premise of that show is that people get grabbed from across time and space and brought to the magical dino island, and so they speak different languages from wherever they’re from. That seemed like it was going to be realistic, and the first time we met a guy who didn’t, you know… The first person we met was from the United States, so he spoke English. Then we met a Roman guy who had recruited like a British scientist, so he had a reason to speak English. But pretty soon, everyone they meet just happens to speak English, except for one Finnish woman. She’s the only person on the entire island who doesn’t speak English.
Chris: The Finns famously cannot comprehend English in the slightest
Oren: And it’s like it just doesn’t make any sense. There’s no reason for English to be the common language everyone speaks in the context of the show. It probably should have been Latin, ’cause that seems to be the biggest power block on the island, is from Rome. But instead it was English. And honestly, for me, I wish they had just said the island has a magical translation field rather than doing that, ’cause to me it just called attention to how silly it was. But it was also cool to see the multiple languages. So your mileage might vary there.
Chris: I wonder if there was… I don’t know much about the techniques using kind of visual media for this, but to do the premise where they are actually talking in Latin, but then still express it to the viewer in English. Because if we have a conqueror who speaks Latin, and we’d have a main character who speaks Latin, you could say that, well, everybody was forced to learn Latin. The main character already knows Latin, and then still have the occasional character who hasn’t managed to learn Latin and then use the language barriers there. It would just be easier in prose, because in prose you can just say they’re talking in Latin and express in English. It’s a little stranger when you’re watching something and hearing audio, because they’re obviously speaking English. And if the entire show takes place in another country, you can go with the premise that they’re all speaking another language, but when you have language barriers built into it, that’s a little weirder.
Bunny: What if they spoke English but with an accent?
Oren: With a Latin… What is a Latin accent in English?
Bunny: I don’t know. You put like eus at the end of most words.
Chris: I guess it’s a dead language, right? So we don’t know.
Bunny: Yeah, that’s true.
Oren: Maybe in Pig Latin. The character’s constantly talking “ex-nay on the upid-stay” sort of situation. But okay, so they could have done what Shogun does. Shogun, of course, is the poster child for integrating language barriers into the story, both the book and the show. In Shogun, Japanese is Japanese on screen. Portuguese is English on screen, and no one speaks English in the entire show. Technically, Blackthorn presumably can speak English, but he never does. So they could have done something like that, right? They could have had a character who is not an English speaker, but I don’t know, starts off speaking her own language, whatever that is, maybe she’s from… I don’t know, maybe she’s from China, she speaks Chinese, and then, when she gets to this island, we translate Latin as English, which is the one that everyone is speaking. I think that could have been done. The transition might be a little awkward, but I think we could manage it.
Bunny: Yeah, that would be one way to do that.
Oren: Speaking of Shogun, the way that Shogun uses its language barriers is, uh, first is it has translator characters and it works them into the plot. Having a translator character in a story where you’re not taking advantage of them is awkward because it basically means that your main character has to have an extra character with them all the time, and that can be logistically difficult. Protagonists tend to go through pretty high-stress situations in which an extra character may not fit.
Chris: Can I just say, though, that Mariko is a terrible translator?
Oren: But she’s so great for drama!
Chris: That’s just the funny thing, is that in a show, it would be a little different. Again, ’cause in prose you can handwave things that you can’t if you are watching, you know, film or watching a video where you have to see what’s happening. In prose, you could just be like, kind of summarize that somebody is translating it first. You can spell it out and then you can handwave it and just have the conversation happen with the assumption that there’s a translator there, but not really narrate all the translation. But in video we have a translator there who’s literally translating every line. And if she was actually a good translator, it would be really boring, because we’d basically be hearing, ’cause we can understand what the main character is saying. ’cause he’s, you know, it’s supposed to be Portuguese, but he’s speaking in English for us. And so then she would just say the same thing and it would just be really dull. So instead, she’s just this terrible translator who is always summarizing what he’s saying and always adding her own agenda.
Bunny: So for story purposes, never have a translator unless they’re a bad translator.
Chris: Well, it makes it interesting, and again, this is a person who doesn’t understand Japanese etiquette, so he says things he really shouldn’t say, and then she smooths it over, right? By paraphrasing or even changing what he says.
Oren: Yeah, which has given us a beautiful new meme format where you have Blackthorn say something like, “Tell Lord Toranaga that I currently run three podcasts,” and then Mariko translates that to, “The Anjin says he is unemployed.” I love it so much. It’s my favorite new meme format. And in most cases Mariko has pretty good reason when she is altering the translation. Not 100%, there are a few points where I wonder, “Mariko, why did you change that? That’s an odd change you made.”
Chris: There are also places where she’s actually called out for inserting her own agenda. So she’s not supposed to be a perfect person.
Oren: And there are also some instances, you see this more in the book, they had to cut some of this from the show for time, where Blackthorn’s translators are just straight up hostile to him. In the show you see the little bit of this where they call the Portuguese Catholics to translate for him and he doesn’t like them, so they translate what he’s saying badly or sometimes just make up stuff and claim he said it. Uh, so that also adds some drama. Shogun also takes place over a long enough period of time that Blackthorn can slowly begin to learn Japanese, whereas if your story takes place in a short period of time, the urge to have your character magically learn the language really fast is strong.
Chris: I’m also thinking, okay, what if you wanted a situation like Blackthorn and Mariko, where you can… the readers understand both of them? You’d probably need to use either omniscient or it would be from the translator’s perspective. So you’d have a character who’s like, “Oh gosh, this person who doesn’t understand our culture is constantly being rude to really powerful lords, and somehow I have to translate in a way that makes it better.”
Oren: I mean, a translator having to manage a rambunctious VIP sounds like a fun story. I’d read that.
Chris: That does!
Oren: I don’t know if it could support a novel, but by the same token, it doesn’t have to. Language barriers don’t have to be all or nothing. They can come up sometimes, so that could be like a thing they have to do for a little while and then the story advances.
Bunny: Right. I’ve noticed that, and this is unsurprising that in stories where the language barrier is handwaved away by a universal translator, the universal translator then breaks. And hence shenanigans.
Oren: Yeah, they like to do the occasional episodes where the translators break. That’s fine.
Chris: I do like reminders that, if we’re going to… if there is supposed to be a language barrier and it’s downplayed a lot, by using technology or something, I think it is nice to get reminders that people are actually speaking different languages, but I think it’s really hard to keep that consistent, because every time Star Trek, “Oh, the Universal Translator breaks,” it just feels very contrived when it works and when it doesn’t.
Oren: Yeah, especially since if you’ve stopped thinking about it for a second, most of the human characters would be speaking different languages. Like maybe they all learn multiple languages in school, just ‘cause. I suppose that’s possible.
Chris: But would Picard be speaking English, British English, or French?
Oren: No, we’ve established that Picard’s family are actually an émigré family from the UK and they live in a little enclave in France and refuse to learn French. That’s the backstory on the Picards. I do think that the Star Trek-style universal translator is similar to aliens with bumpy foreheads in that it’s something we let Star Trek get away with, but it would be pretty hokey to do that in your novel. I think you would want something a little more believable than that.
Chris: Yeah, if you have a really advanced space opera setting with really high technology levels and you want to just handwave language barriers, I don’t think that’s a terrible way to do that. I think you could just state it once and then not call attention to it again.
Oren: Yeah. That, maybe. I do think, if you want to try something that’s a little bit more immersive, we made fun of Common earlier, but the concept of a lingua franca. That is perfectly legitimate. You can definitely have a language that people learn as their second language for the purposes of communication. You just want it to make a little more sense than “every fantasy species has one language, and the human one is called Common.”
Chris: That’s a little funky.
Oren: Typically speaking, a lingua franca is going to be the language of some powerful group. And it can be as simple as whoever the most powerful state around is. Their language is the lingua franca, and maybe they even enforce learning it. That’s the thing that can happen. It can also be a state that is not militarily powerful, but has a lot of commerce. Arabic is a lingua franca and has been historically, because Arab traders went around all over the place, so speaking Arabic was a good way to talk to people you’d otherwise wouldn’t share a language with.
Chris: I do understand the impulse to call some language Common or Basic because, again, it’s avoiding adding one more word the readers have to memorize. But if you already have a powerful country, empire, or another well known name in your setting, then you can just potentially reuse that, as long as it sounds similar enough that people can guess, “Okay, that word is for the language that people in this place speak.” So people don’t have to learn, “Oh, what is that again? Oh, that’s the name of the language.” Especially since people don’t necessarily talk about the name of their languages that often, so it’s hard to remember.
Oren: First, you need to introduce the concept of a lingua franca and then explain that the lingua franca is not French. It used to be, but now it’s a different language.
Bunny: And Picard does not speak it.
Oren: And, of course, depending on the scope of your setting, you can probably just handwave it and say that whoever the main character runs into happens to speak whatever language they speak. That might get hard to believe if your character is going, you know, is well traveled and goes around a long way, but if your character stays relatively close to home, that’s fine. Even if they meet a foreigner, it’s reasonable that foreigner would know the language of the country they’re traveling in.
Chris: Yeah, I think there’s a lot you can do if your scope is smaller. Like the issue with the Ark show is, of course we’re taking everybody from around the world in all time periods and putting them together, which is a really difficult position to be in when it comes to language barriers. But if you just have a few travelers going to a different country where they speak a different language, then you can just be like, most of them learn it, or a few people are fluent, one person has it rough but can get by, and you’ll be okay. Or if they’re just going to one place, you can have a local pidgin that everybody uses that works well enough. It’s when you’re doing a lot of combined people from all over the place that it just gets hard.
Oren: Yeah. Oh, and also, I’m sure we should have mentioned this with the Ark thing. I’m sure there’s also a group of people who wouldn’t mind if most of the dialogue was in Latin with English subtitles. That would probably have reduced the show’s audience, so I suspect that’s why they didn’t do it.
Chris: I just think that would be hard for the all the voice actors.
Oren: Sure. But on the other hand, how many people know Latin and can tell they’re messing it up?
Bunny: You haven’t met the Philosophy Department.
Chris: Think of how hard it would be to memorize your lines if they were in a language you didn’t know.
Oren: They do it. They don’t do it at wellness.
Chris: I mean, I just don’t think that’s how you’re going to get the best acting.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: Philosophy is how I learned, through one of my philosophy professors who used to be a Classics professor and studied Latin, that philosophy pronounces the phrase prima facie wrong. It’s actually like prima fak-ye or something. So that’s a… prima facie is a good way to get Latin enthusiasts annoyed if ever the need arises.
Oren: Look, there are a lot of actual Latin pronunciations that sound pretty silly by modern English standards, and so we’ve massaged how we say that.
Bunny: I would just say that if we had to go with only actors who knew Latin, we wouldn’t get Michelle Yeoh in there. And that would be very sad.
Oren: That would be sad.
Bunny: Hey, maybe she secretly knows Latin.
Oren: She could. We don’t… we just don’t know.
Chris: Michelle Yeoh is really having a moment right now, I gotta say.
Oren: So let’s assume that you… instead of doing all that, you want to have bridging the language barrier be part of your story. A prime example of this is in the novel Hail Mary, where our protagonist meets an alien and has to figure out how to talk to him.
Chris: Yeah. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
Oren: Yeah, that is real challenging. And Hail Mary manages it. It’s like decent, but it did at the time strike me as a little handwavy. Like they do a lot of work. He figures out some computer programs and assigns sounds to it and that’s neat. But it just… it did feel like he probably accomplished that much faster than he would actually be able to do it.
Chris: Yeah. I’m okay with a little fast forward. On something, I think for practical reasons, stories do that for all sorts of things. The training montage, for instance, whenever a character learns how to fight, they somehow do it really fast. And languages take so long to learn. I think a little fast forwarding, a little bit, is not going to throw too many readers out. But he really did put a lot of emphasis on it, and I think it did help that there was computer software that was programmed to do the translation for him also involved. Again, not perfect, but that’s probably, besides Arrival, that’s probably the most I’ve seen a story focus on translation. Arrival is neat because it has an actual linguist who actually has to figure out how to speak with aliens that, again, you can’t just translate, because it’s a completely new language. So even a universal translating program doesn’t have the ability. There’s no data. So she has to go meet these aliens and start working with them to develop a vocabulary. Um, and that’s also what happens in Project Hail Mary. It’s just… I don’t think she gets all the way there. I don’t think it needs her to get fluent with them in the same way that the main character has to get fluent with alien in Project Hail Mary.
Oren: Right. Like she doesn’t have to construct complicated engineering devices with these aliens. She does have to learn time travel though, so, but that’s like a function of the language apparently.
Chris: That’s… yeah, she just gets that as a bonus.
Oren: Yeah, strong bonus power.
Bunny: Yeah. The harder you think in the alien language, the more time travel you get.
Oren: One other thing with lingua francas I forgot to mention, which is that, especially in a sci-fi setting, you could probably manage it so that everyone speaks a constructed language. Space Esperanto. That’s more believable to me in a sci-fi setting than in a setting that’s more historical.
Chris: So here’s a question: if they had Space Esperanto, would they just call it Common or Basic?
Oren: They might call it Basic. Okay, I’m willing to believe they might call it Basic.
Bunny: They would call it Esperanto, no matter the context.
Chris: So maybe in Star Wars they’re just speaking Esperanto, which is called Basic.
Oren: If you go into the Extended Universe…
Bunny: Well, let’s not go into the Extended Universe.
Chris: Oh, no! What have I done? I have podcasted too greedily and too deep!
Oren: I do not remember what the origin of Basic is in the Star Wars Extended Universe.
Chris: Gosh, I remember our early podcast episodes, when Star Wars would come up, and then you and Mike would just go off onto long tangents about the Star Wars EU.
Oren: Let me tell you about the time Han Solo kidnapped Princess Leia and took her on a romantic vacation to rancor planet.
Chris: I had to interrupt and be like, “Let’s talk about Buffy now.”
Oren: Hmm, I think it’s time to talk about rancor planet, Chris. I’ve got an essay prepared.
Bunny: So, for the purposes of say, the odd person who might be writing their language barriers in written medium that does not have sound, do you think, and I think I know the answer to this, but do you think it’s ever worthwhile to write down the actual sounds that the other language is making, or do you think it should always be description? I don’t know, “She spoke something in a low voice.”
Oren: As opposed to writing the phonetic spelling?
Bunny: Yeah.
Chris: I do have a couple articles on this, if you want to have a conlang in your story, for instance, but that’s where it tends to come up a lot, because people make their conlangs for their worlds and then they really want to show them off. Naming is usually the best place to do that. So you can name places or things like that after words in the language, but I think there are other things that are like repeated phrases, like greetings, for instance, a standard greeting or a standard goodbye. If you want to show that off, it’s a good place to do that. Things that are like repeated phrases that your readers can slowly learn. But just like a normal dialogue, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of reason to do that.
Oren: Yeah. Especially ’cause this is not like a language that some of your readers might know, right? This is a made up language. No one reading this book will know it. And it’s just a very high barrier. And if you don’t know how to do conlangs really well, there’s a good chance it’s just going to come across as silly, so I’m not going to say there’s never a period where you might want to do more of that, maybe you are really good at con languages, in which case that could add some fun novelty to it, but the authors that I’ve worked with who’ve tried this have not been at that skill level and have honestly not been interested in committing the time to do it ’cause they just want to tell their story.
Chris: Yeah, I would think of using it for proper nouns, like place names, and then maybe you could teach your reader 10 words during the course of the whole novel. Something that’s just… really, you gotta set your ambitions a lot lower, and writing an entire dialogue line in a language the reader can’t understand just doesn’t make any sense. It’s just not going to be a good experience.
Bunny: Yeah. I will say I’ve seen the stunt quite poorly, where it feels like the character starts unlocking words because suddenly certain words are in English, but we’re meant to be understanding that they’ve just realized what those words mean, which is really awkward.
Chris: Speaking of which, we haven’t even talked about The 100, which is one of the more interesting uses of conlangs in a TV show, where the funny thing is, the characters have been in a space station since the apocalypse, and they come back down to Earth and they meet people who have been on Earth, and technically, it’s only supposed to have been 100 years, but every time they say that, I just plug my ears and go, “La, la, la, I can’t hear you.” It’s ridiculous. So then they find that the people there have developed their own language called Trigedasleng. But they also speak English, because that would be too much for them to have the language barrier. But I have to say, I still like the language. During the course of the show, you learn a lot of words and then later, when they travel somewhere else, by that time, all the characters who used to be in space have learned this language, and now they can use it, so that the other people can’t understand them, which actually makes it useful in the plot, whereas it was never useful in the plot before.
Oren: It was so goofy, though, when they were talking to this guy and trying to understand his language, and then he just switches to English. What?
Chris: I mean, yeah, there’s multiple things here. Like how do they develop a language so fast? If they were going to develop a language so fast, how is it that they still know English? Yeah, that was interesting.
Oren: It’s cool later on, when they actually use it for something, but I don’t think that was worth the cost at the beginning, is my hot take. As opposed to my favorite language barrier that doesn’t make sense: Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
Chris: Yeah, Darmok and Jalad! Their arms open!
Oren: Where they all speak in memes. Nothing about that makes any sense, but I love it anyway, and therefore it’s perfect.
Chris: Shaka, when the walls fell. I’m probably getting all those words wrong, I don’t know Darmok very well.
Oren: Look, it’s fine. It’s a meme. What’s important is the meme, okay? That’s like… the fact that you speak in memes, you can also say things like, “Surprise white guy, his eyes blinking,” and there, now you’re in the spirit of things. Okay. Speaking of which, I think we are about out of time for this episode. So remember I’ve been speaking in droid bleeps this whole time, so if it sounded like English, it’s just ’cause that’s how great our translator is.
Chris: And if you would like, or to continue speaking in something that sounds like English instead of beeps, we need to keep that universal translator working. So consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Aman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Music]
Outro: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.