The Language Barrier

I usually have a lot more notes about what I’m going to say before I actually sit and write a Saturday Note. Not so this week! Part of it is because I scrapped the idea I had written down earlier in the week (I had done it two or three years ago, it seems), and part of it is because I was very busy on Friday.

I am DONE with Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. There are a few things I can do on the game, still, but right now I’ve done everything I really want to do, and I’m tired of running Assassin operations in the Mediterranean. 

 

For Hispanic Heritage Month: this wonderful traditional Spanish song. 

The Language Barrier

I’ve kind of noticed that language barriers are less of a thing in fiction.

Okay, a lot of random inconveniences from life are not so much of an issue in speculative fiction. It’s rather famous that fantasy fiction is lacking in scenes of characters going to the bathroom, for instance, and it’s because we don’t really care about that kind of thing. We assume it’s going on. Language barriers are not quite assumed to be bypassed all the time, though–presumably, in a historical, science-fiction, or fantasy setting, there are different languages being spoken, we just don’t ever have to deal with that being a problem.

A lot of stories give excuses, I just don’t think they’re generally good ones. Dragon Age, for instance, has it so that aside from Elvish, everyone just speaks the same language, a Common Tongue that even rival nations with vastly different cultures all speak. Why? Because it makes things a lot easier than having to invent another new language, or having our characters have to go through translators for important story interactions between cultures–of which there are a lot!

Likewise, something like Guardians of the Galaxy shows none of the characters having any sort of issue speaking between different societies (aside from Groot). There’s a random note in one scene (or it might just be in the trailer?) that indicates that translation implants are A Thing in this universe, but no one ever mentions it. There’s apparently one guy (Groot) who speaks differently, and everyone else has the same language?

I wouldn’t say Star Wars has this problem because there are a lot of background characters who don’t speak English (or Basic, rather)--Huttese seems a very common language, too. And obviously there’s Chewbacca. Having a standard language seems pretty sensible when there’s a Republic/Empire that spans most of known space, as opposed to the Marvel Universe when it doesn’t seem as if there’s a common culture or government uniting these vast reaches of space–unless we count would-be conquerors like the Asgardians or Kree.

I suppose, with movies, it would be very frustrating to have characters work with translators all the time. I remember watching The Thirteenth Warrior, and my dad saying he didn’t believe that Fadlan picked up the Nordic language so quickly I responded by pointing out that in the original novel, he didn’t, he just had to do all of his conversations with others through the one guy he found who speaks Greek. The novel can get away with this because it’s written more as a historical account and doesn’t have to relay the dialogue like a modern novel might try to do.

And I guess, yeah, it’d be inconvenient in most movies, or in TV shows, especially if you’re using made-up languages that most people don’t speak. I still think it’d be interesting in books if you do more with the idea of a language barrier. Have our characters in space come across an alien species where they don’t speak the same language, and how do the protagonists deal with that limitation?

Or in fantasy–there are different species and races, surely the languages would cause some kinds of issues or mix-ups? And there are other ways you can play with characters using different languages, other than obvious barriers. Just as an example: one of the ways that Galadriel endears herself to Gimli in The Lord of the Rings is that she uses the Dwarvish name for Moria, rather than the Elvish one, helping to overcome the barrier between their races.

I also think having a translator character gets around the issue of exposition a bit. It might still be a little of an info-dump, but if your protagonist has to have another character, a local, give them a tour and translate things like cultural nuance and what words mean, or even just basic phrases and greetings–well, you have a character who has a reason to info-dump within the context of the story. Or if you really want to mess with the audience, have the translator be an unreliable person, either because the character is trying to trick the protagonist, or because there are a lot of insults that the translator doesn’t want to convey to someone else to be polite.

[And then there’s a fun little bit in Dresden Files in which the Red King declares that since he didn’t make the promise, the translator did, he’s not bound to keep it. What a dick!]

I feel like a lot of fantasy and science-fiction could be doing more with languages, and how different peoples speak different languages and the issues that can cause. And I am not saying that any of the works I mentioned above are bad if they don’t do that–I think I like all of the examples I used–but it’s a little bit of a missed opportunity and you can play around with a ton of things. 

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