Babel, by R. F. Kuang, is a 2022 Alternate-History low-fantasy novel about translators who perform enchantments for the glory of the British Empire. The magic is fictional, but the translation theory is real: the Oxford translation class lectures are a legit callback to grad school. Why are translators performing magic? Because true translation is fundamentally impossible, and magic arises from the sometimes-subtle, sometimes-vast differences in meanings between attempted translations from one language to another.
Naturally, there is quite a lot of non-English representation in such a novel. Our main character, Robin, is a native speaker of Cantonese, so the first example we get is a a string of orthographic Chinese characters, which I cannot type easily to reproduce for you here--but, we immediately get diegetic transcription and translation:
'Húlún tūn zǎo,' he read slowly, taking care to enunciate every syllable. He switched to English. 'To accept without thinking.'
Note the conventional use of italics for non-English text. Here we get three parallel representations of the same bit of language, allowing the reader to understand what it actually looks like written, approximately how it sounds via romanization, and approximately what it means through Robin's translation of what he just read.
Robin is quickly introduced to the non-magical responsibilities of translation and interpretation:
This all hinged on him, Robin realized. The choice was his. Only he could determine the truth, because only he could communicate it to all parties.
The book is chock full of this kind of stuff--not just directly representing other languages, but explicitly teaching the reader about real concepts in linguistics and translation theory through the mode of having the characters learn and discuss them. Skipping ahead a bit, here is a taste of one of the theory lectures:
'The first lesson any good translator internalizes is that there is no one-to-one correlation between wrds or even concepts from one language to another. [...] If [there was], then translation would not be a highly skilled profession - we would simply sit in a class full of dewy-eyed freshers down with dictionaries and have the completed works of the Buddha on our shelves in no time. Instead, we have to learn to dance between that age-old dichotomy, helpfully elucidated by Cicero and Heironymous: verbum e verbo and sensum e sensu. Can anyone--'
'Word for word,' Letty said promptly. 'And sense for sense.'
And a bit of philosophizing later on reminded me rather strongly of the aliens from The Embedding:
We will never speak the divine language. But by amassing all the world's languages under this roof, by collecting the full range of human expressions, or as near to it as we can get, we can try.
And in fact, this is not a bad description of the project of natural language documentation and typology.
The next instance of non-English representation makes use of footnotes to provide a non-diegetic translation for what he character already understands:
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium atque ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant.
Robin parsed the sentence, consulted his dictionary to check that auferre meant what he thought it did, then wrote out his translation.*
*'Robbery, butchery, and theft - they call these things empire, and where they create a desert, they call it peace.'
Although in this case, the translation does exist in the story, and so could've been included in-line, that is not so for all of the footnotes, some of which exist entirely outside of the story. For example:
for a full year Robin thought The Rape of the Lock was about fornication with an iron bolt instead of the theft of hair.*
* A reasonable error. By rape, Pope meant 'to snatch, to take by force', which is an older meaning derived from the Latin rapere.
I could continue with a detailed analysis of every sample of non-English language, as I did exhaustively for some other books earlier on in this series--but I would end up quoting from about a thrid of all pages in the book, and we'd be here all day! The range of integrative and interpretive techniques in use is actually pretty well covered by those few examples I have quoted so far. But what's really unique about the book is the extent to which it confronts the reader with concepts that you might not otherwise have to face outside of a graduate-level course in linguistics or translation, and in ways that are actually relevant to the plot. Consider:
What was a word? What was the smallest possible unit of meaning, and why was that different from a word? Was a word different from a character? In what ways was Chinese speech different from Chinese writing?
That matters for understanding the magic system and for understanding the nature of the relationships between characters. This is a masterclass in science fiction with linguistics as the underlying science... except that it's technically fantasy instead of science fiction. There's refreshingly not a single whiff of Whorfianism or UG anywhere--as there shouldn't be as those concepts would not have existed in the historical period in which this story is set!
The book also briefly addresses The Forbidden Experiment--and contributes to foreshadowing the true villainy of one of our antagonists by having him seriously entertain it as a possibility (which is unsurprising, given how he has up till then manipulated the lives of Robin and his friends).
I shall leave off with one more quote on semantic theory:
Does meaning refer to something that supercedes the words we use to describe out world? I think, intuitively, yes. Otherwise we would have no basis for critiquing a translation as accurate or inaccurate, not without some unspeakable sense of what it lacked.
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