Foreign Voices: Lessons from Colonial Era Literature about Rendering Multilingual Dialogue

“THE motion picture industry uses techniques such as subtitles and dubbing to help viewers understand foreign dialogue. But how are writers of literary fiction to meet that same challenge?” asks the author Bernard Botes Krüger. Contending that fiction is no longer able to offer realistic portrayals of today’s increasingly multilingual urban societies through mere translations into standard English, he argues that it has become imperative to enable readers to ‘hear’ authentic foreign voices, even if the ‘standard’ language may have to be manipulated and at times even sacrificed in order to accomplish that end.

The concept of including foreign-language dialogue in fiction is not new; many accomplished authors of the past have used a variety of skillful techniques to help their readers understand instances of ‘foreign’ dialogue in English texts. However, those techniques 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.

The author Robert Louis Stevenson once referred to such techniques as the “springs and mechanism” of the art, and to examining them as ‘prying below the surface’ to discover how the “strings and pulleys” operate. That is precisely what literature students and authors alike will accomplish by studying this book.

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).