Foreign Voices : Lessons from a Colonial Era Literature About Rendering Multilingual Dialogue

"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.

Bernard Botes Krüger is a fifth-generation descendant of the legendary Anglo-Boer War president Paul Krüger, growing up in South Africa during the turbulent Apartheid era. Born in 1952, he spent his formative years in a rural area designated a part of the Zulu homeland. At the age of eighteen he was incarcerated in a Pretoria military prison for refusal to perform compulsory military service in that country’s ‘terrorist’ war, spending a total of 15 months in solitary confinement. After his release, he devoted the next decade to volunteer work, often among African tribes in some of the remotest parts of Southern Africa.

Bernard Krüger is first and foremost a linguist who is best described as a ‘hyperpolyglot’, speaking no fewer than ten languages. His life’s passion has been the promotion of multiculturalism, as opposed to nationalism, to which endeavor this book bears ample testimony.

Since 1986, he has been a resident of the United States, now living and writing in Sausalito, California. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of South Africa (UNISA), and a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Warnborough College (Ireland).