Three Miles Down is the latest Alternate History novel from the prolific Harry Turtledove. In 1974, marine biology grad student Jerry Stieglitz is recruited by the CIA to assist with a secret operation to raise a sunken Russian nuclear sub... which turns out to be a cover story for an even more secret operation to raise a crashed alien spacecraft. Why do they need a marine biologist? Because Jerry has been studying whale vocalizations and trying to decode them, making him one of the best-qualified people on the planet to potentially decipher an alien language in a first-contact scenario.
This sounds like the perfect book for me, no? Well, don't get me wrong, it is a good book, and if you want a spy thriller featuring a bunch of classic SF authors, this is the book for you!--but I was left dissapointed on the linguistic front. We don't actually come face-to-face with the aliens themselves until the last few pages, and the story wraps up before Jerry ever has to try actually talking to them. This is not Turtledove's first novel involving alien contact, and others (notably, the Worldwar series) do put human-alien interaction more front-and-center, so I'm gonna have to go re-read some of those older ones and see how the language barrier was handled--I hadn't taken a single formal class in linguistics or literary analysis the last time I read through A World of Difference, for example! (But hey, Harry--if you ever feel like writing a sequel, and you need advice on portraying the process of establishing communication in detail, hit me up!)
However, there is some Russian (because they're messing around near a Russian sub, so Russians show up) and some Yiddish (because Jerry is Jewish) which we can look at to see what techniques Turtledove employs for integration. When Jerry gets ont he radio with a Russian ship, we are mostly treated to conventional non-diegetic translation of the conversation into English, but there are some Russian words thrown in; for example:
"I read you loud and clear," a Russian voice answered in his headphones.
"Talk slow, pozhaluista. My Russian nye khorosho."
We've got a lot of context clues just in this tiny excerpt to establish the translation convention and the fact that they are actually speaking Russian--a "Russian voice" answers, Jerry is talking about his Russian, and we get a few untranslated words thrown in as well, italicized to set them off as foreign. This is similar to the overall technique that Graham Bradley used in Kill the Beast, where untranslated French words are thrown into the mostly-English representation of the dialog just to periodically remind us that the characters are actually French. Note that Turtledove chose to us a Romanized transliteration of the Russian, so Anglophone readers can have some hope of figuring out what it ought to sound like, rather than putting the orthographic Cyrillic in the text.
The next interesting bit involves fome diegetic code-switching, with non-diegetic translation for the sake of the reader (quoting as little as possible to avoid spoilers):
"[...]If you don't want to get dealt in to whatever people can learn from that spaceship, go ahead. Laugh at me. And yob tvoyu mat'."
His Russian TAs and profs had all warned him never to say that:
At first, I thought Turtledove had chosen to render that in Russian so as not to offend the Anglophone reader, or at least "soften the blow" since foreign insults tend not to have the same emotional effect as those in your native language. But then he goes right ahead and gives the English translation on the next line (which you will note I have cut out from my quotation), and it hit me that exactly the opposite thing is going on: Jerry is explicitly trying to insult the person he is talking to, and knows that speaking in the audience's native language will both provide a greater emotional impact and remind them that, yes, Jerry does understand Russian himself. That's some excellent sociolinguistics right there.
And the next interesting bit subtly provides some insight into Russian culture:
After a while, the man in the outdated black suit looked in and asked, "You would like dinner?"
"Da, Georgi Pavlovich. Bolshoye spasibo," Jerry answered. He still had no idea of the Russian's family name. First name and patronymic were enough for politeness.
Now, my ability to analyze this objectively is a little strained by the fact that I already speak Russian, so what I think was made obvious is confounded by what I already know, and might not perfectly reflect the experience of the naive reader. But I think Turtledove has done a pretty good job here. "Da", as the equivalent of "yes", was introduced in an earlier conversation in the book, so Turtledove is doing just a little bit of Teaching the Reader here, but beyond that: Jerry is clearly addressing the guy who just asked a question, and we can recognize his name, Georgi, in the response. Jerry is choosing to respond in Russian to be polite because Georgi has just demonstrated that his English isn't perfect, by asking a grammatically-ill-formed question. The narrator tells us that Jerry doesn't know Georgi's family name, so we can conclude that "Pavlovich" is not his family name, and infer that it must be the patronymic, and that that is the formula for polite address in Russian. And you can probably make a good guess that "Bolshoye spasibo" is some variation on "thank you" because we know that Jerry is specifically concerned with politeness. Perfect exchange, dense narration, no notes.
There's a little bit more Russian, and I've completely ignored the Yiddish, but that should be sufficient to cover the most linguistically-interesting bits.
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