One of my biggest pet peeves in fic looks like this:
“Я сказал вам, что это было как в Будапеште,” Natasha muttered. I told you this was like Budapest.
And somewhere at the end of the fic, a note:
I don’t speak Russian, so I’m sorry if there are any mistakes!
Yes, there are. Yeah, there are mistakes, because Google Translate is wonderful, but it’s not that wonderful. For example, in the sentence above, сказал does mean said - in the masculine gender. It’s Natasha talking, so the proper word would be сказала, with the feminine ending.
So someone corrects you. And you are a conscientious writer, and you hate having errors in your fic, so you fix it, so now it looks like this:
“Я сказала вам, что это было как в Будапеште,” Natasha muttered. I told you this was like Budapest.
And the Author’s Notes look like this:
I don’t speak Russian, so I’m sorry if there are any mistakes!
UPD 1/6/15 Thank you fromrussiawithlove98 for the correction!
And then the problem is fixed! Right?
Well…
See, the glaring grammatical error is gone. But it’s still off. For one thing, Natasha probably addresses Clint by the familiar ты, not the formal вы. But even apart from that, the entire way the sentence is constructed is… off. It just doesn’t sound like something a native speaker would say. I can get further into this, but for our purposes, let’s say your Friendly Russian Speaker™ gives you a less awkward sounding version:
“Я же тебе говорила что это похоже на Будапешт,” Natasha muttered. I told you this was like Budapest.
Notice two things. One, that took a lot of time and attention, both from you and your Friendly Russian Speaker™. And two, to the vast majority of your audience, not only do the two versions look exactly the same, they also look the same as this:
“Д гдгдн еррснйпя аддсфйрнл вврнерн цсс пере,” Natasha muttered. I told you this was like Budapest.
(Yes, that’s the result of keyboard smash. For extra fun, put it through Google Translate.)
What I can’t understand is why people don’t just do this:
“I told you this was like Budapest,” Natasha muttered in Russian.
I mean, putting in Russian words makes it look cool, sure. But is that really what you want people thinking about when they are reading? You do everything you can to keep the story flowing smoothly, and then you deliberately interrupt with random symbols. For heavens’ sakes, put it in italics or something if you want to emphasize that it’s not English.
You have objections. I know. Your first one probably sounds like this:
So-and-so does it! You aren’t suggesting that so-and-so is a bad author, are you?
No, I’m not. I’m suggesting this one technique that so-and-so uses is a mistake. In fact, I see this far more often in really good fics than in poor ones, which, as you may be able to imagine, makes me bang my head against a lot of walls.
But it’s such an appealing idea! Intuitively, it makes so much sense!
I know. That, I assume, is why so many good writers do it. But it’s just not as clever as you think it is. This is not a reflection on your worth as a person or a writer - Tolstoy put entire French paragraphs into War and Peace, and it wasn’t terribly clever then, either. (To be fair, Tolstoy was writing for the Russian intelligentsia and nobility of the time, almost all of whom spoke French fluently. It was still a mistake. But I digress.)
The movie did it!
Yes, unfortunately they did. I love Scarlett Johansson deeply, but her accent in the interrogation scene in Avengers makes me cringe and shudder. I’m not sure I can convey just how American she sounds. It’s a little painful to listen to. But the thing about movies is, they don’t have the ability that you have, to just say, “Oh, they’re speaking Russian now.” To be at all credible, a movie must actually make them speak Russian. And then put subtitles, which is their advantage, since it’s much easier to read subtitles on a screen than it is to read translations in fic. Let’s face it, that example above? That’s easy. A lot of translations are in endnotes.
But I want to convey the way it sounds.
Mmm. Makes sense. You’re transliterating the words into English characters, right? Because if you’re using Cyrillic characters, you’re not conveying anything. So, actually, your example looks like this:
“Ya zhe tebe govorila chto eto pohozhe na Budapest,” Natasha muttered. I told you this was like Budapest.
A fair fraction of your readers, probably more than half, will just skip over this like they would the Cyrillic version. Most of the remainder will try it out, get most of it wrong, and continue in blissful ignorance of this fact. Why am I so sure they will be wrong? Podfics. I promise you, the word tebe, meaning you (well, to you, because cases), will inevitably be pronounced teeb, not teh-beh the way it’s supposed to be, zh will make everyone choke, and may God help you if you have a sch in your sentence.
And that’s assuming you transliterated it correctly in the first place. Which is a fair assumption if your friendly Russian speaker helped you out, but otherwise… Good luck.
That being said, this works a great deal better if you’re just putting in a word or two instead of whole sentences. In fact, this is true of every single factor I mention in this post. Put a 20-character limit on phrases in other languages, and you’ll be fine.
But I want to use this to show that my character is feeling deep emotion.
Seems legit. We’ll ignore for a moment the fact that I’ve never heard anyone actually do this in real life, because I’m kind of a sucker for this trope too. And we’ll ignore the fact that a character like Natasha Romanoff is in control of herself at all times and very rarely shows deep emotion. (Yes, the movie did this too. In this case, it was only a quick боже мой and not a full sentence, and it does much better, as per the 20-character rule.)
Here’s my question: if you are writing a deeply emotional moment, why would you want to throw the reader off by making your character hard to understand? If, say, you were writing an epistolary novel, you could communicate emotion by making spelling and grammar errors, but that would make your writing difficult to understand, so you wouldn’t do it much. The same principle applies here.
Besides, it’s really not as subtle as you think.
But I want my characters to speak in a different language so that another character doesn’t understand what they are saying.
I see this one a lot. And unlike the deep emotion thing, this is something real people do all the time. (Especially Russians, because let’s face it, we’re all terrible people.) The problem is that, for this to make any sense, you need to have the whole conversation be in Russian. That gets really tedious, really fast.
So how do you write characters speaking a foreign language as a code without breaking your readers? It depends on the point of view. If your viewpoint character is part of the conversation, just use an “in Russian” tag. If not, well, they shouldn’t be understanding it, should they? “She muttered something in Russian” works much better.
(If you’re trying to make your readers understand something your POV character doesn’t, things get dicey. And by dicey, I mean
really hard to do without head-hopping. If you don’t know what head-hopping is, it’s that awkward jump between POVs mid-scene, and many, many professional authors have written about how it’s bad and you shouldn’t do it; see, for example,
Patricia Wrede’s post.)
Above all, for the sake of all that is holy, do not put an essential plot point into a translated sentence. No, seriously. NO, I MEAN IT. In fact, assume that, whatever you do, a significant proportion of your readers will skip the translation entirely.
Fine, I won’t write any Russian sentences. But there’s this great Chinese proverb I want to include in the original Chinese…
NO! NO! Everything I’ve told you applies to any language you wish to name. I used to think my annoyance was just me being a Russian-grammar Nazi until I realized I was more annoyed at languages I didn’t understand. You really think other languages are any different? Don’t do it.
Ok, you keep telling us what not to do. Why don’t you tell us what we should do instead? After all, the title of this post is “How To Write Russian Characters”.
A fair point. I will, but not in this post. That’s a different post. Several different posts, most likely. I have a few ideas, but if you have suggestions, let me know.
I am also always happy to help if you need a Friendly Russian Speaker™. Message me on tumblr or AO3 or something.
(All authors and awkward Russian sentences are entirely made up. Any resemblance to real people or fics is unintentional.)
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