Kill the Beast is a 2017 novella by author & illustrator Graham Bradley. It is a new, gaslamp-fantasy take on the "Beauty and the Beast" genre of fairytales, in which the Beauty is a ditz, the Beauty's father is genuinely insane, the Beast really is a dangerous monster, and the self-absorbed town heartthrob... is right. And grows a bit by the end.
Being set in a fantastical version of 19th-century France, the characters are naturally assumed to be "actually" speaking French. But being written for a modern English-speaking audience, the language of narration is, of course, English. Thus, there is an assumed translation convention--the dialogue is written, mostly, in English, because that is what the readers will understand, but we also understand that that English text is just a translated representation of fictionally-underlying French.
And to make the fictional reality of the setting clear, Bradley periodically allows the underlying French to shine through.
The instances in which this is done in Kill the Beast can be broadly categorized into three approaches:
1. Make It Obvious
"Tell us your name, dearie,"
"Je m'appelle Danielle"
A new character stumbles into the tavern (where all the best adventures start) from out in the cold. They are asked their name. They respond with... some French, and a name.
Is there any doubt about what the French dialogue might mean? No! The context makes it obvious. Sure, the author could have put something else there. The character could've been an uncooperative jerk and said something different. But if that were the case, the author wouldn't have chosen that specific place to show the French.
If you have a bit of text that you could simply blank out from the page, and the reader would not be lost because the context allows them to fill in what meaning must have been there, you have an opportunity to employ this strategy. It doesn't matter that the reader doesn't speak the language, because what it means... is obvious.
2. Make It Irrelevant
"Mon frère! It took my brother!"
What did she say first? Eh, I dunno, does it matter? If you know what it says, you know that it doesn't matter; everything you need to know is in the English.
People naturally say a lot of things that don't add much to the literal meaning of a conversation. Natural-sounding dialogue includes them. If you can delete it from the text entirely and the story will still make sense--not just redact it so the reader knows there's something to fill in, but remove all evidence of it--then you have an opportunity to employ this strategy. Most interjections fall into this category. Context usually makes the pragmatic meaning of exclamations like "sacre bleu!", "bon sang!", and so on, obvious enough; but more importantly, an understanding of their literal meaning is just not needed. Putting them in anyway, though, helps with the worldbuilding!
3. Make it an Easter Egg
"Tais-toi, Leroux. Grab your things, we're going."
A story can be enjoyed without an Easter Egg, but noticing it makes the story just a bit better. The ideal deployment of an Easter Egg leaves a reader who doesn't know the language thinking that it was just another case of "Make It Irrelevant", but reveals something interesting-but-non-critical to the reader who does understand. In this case, the French looks like just another random interjection to get somebody's attention, as we have seen many times before. In reality, though, the speaker has just told Leroux to shut up. Is that a critical distinction to understand what comes next? No. But it does tell you something about the characters' relationship if you do understand it.
In other media, John Carpenter's The Thing makes excellent use of this strategy in the first 5 minutes. If you don't speak Norwegian, that's OK; you're not meant to understand it, and thus it is not subtitled. But if you do understand Norwegian, it adds an extra level of dramatic irony over everything that follows.
Other Strategies
Il était un ami fidèle.
"'He was a loyal friend.' That's quite beautiful, actually."
A fourth strategy--explicit narrative translation-- is marginally present. This is usually employed as an extra-fictional narrative device, as when movies and TV shows use subtitles to make foreign-language dialogue accessible to the audience, but here it occurs entirely in character--a considerably more difficult thing to pull off, which also causes this example to overlap with the "Make it Obvious" strategy.
Kill the Beast is available for free on Kindle Unlimited or as a paperback through Amazon.
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