Translation Convention / Literature

The Translation Convention in literature.

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• The Alice Network: Although characters speak in English, French, and German, it’s generally rendered in English, except for the occasional bit of untranslated French or German (usually something either then translated by the narration or something the reader could easily figure out).
• A staple in the works of Cormac McCarthy. All the Pretty Horses, for example, features long passages of untranslated Spanish.
• American Girl:
  • Kaya is not speaking English, and neither is Josefina—they speak Nimipuutímt and Spanish respectively. The books are written in English, with added words in their native languages.
  • Kristen speaks Swedish at home and has to learn English in her series (it's a major plot point) and Singing Bird at best speaks smatterings of English. The books translate all the Swedish into English.
  • Cécile and Marie-Grace are bilingual, speaking fluent French and English—but their "French" is written in English for the sake of the readers.
• Ancillary Justice uses this enthusiastically. There are several points where Breq uses a phrase that makes perfect sense in English, but mentions that it's awkward in Radchaai due to the assumptions underlying that language (for example, Radchaai apparently lacks a word for "citizen" that doesn't imply citizenship in the Radch). This is also notable in the pronoun use, in which every character is identified as "she" because Radchaai doesn't use gendered pronouns. (Ann Leckie had originally written it using "he" as the neutral pronoun, but given that science fiction is a bit of a sausage fest, it was hard to tell it apart from general sci-fi.)
• In the Antares novels, the Ryall speak English in scenes from their perspectives. However, they cannot understand English, though one rather observant prisoner manages to figure out our military ranks. A number of Ryall eventually learn English, while some humans learn Ryall.
• Ascendance of a Bookworm: Myne has a brief period of not understanding the language of the new world in which she has reincarnated until she gains access to the memories belonging to the body that her personality unwittingly took over. After that, the world's language is rendered in Japanese (or whatever language the translation is in). However, since the new body belonged to a poor five-year-old girl, words the girl didn't know come out in Japanese until she learns the setting's equivalent. Myne also needs to learns how to read and write in her new world's language all over again, despite the fact that she could do both in her previous modern-day Japan life.
• In L. Ron Hubbard's book Battlefield Earth, the book has a "translator's note" that it is printed in English because of the "unavailability of proper Psychlo fonts".
• This trope is amusingly played with in Captain Corelli's Mandolin. The book is set on the Greek island of Cephalonia and all the characters are Greek-speaking. Later on, the resistance movement is joined by a British spy whose only knowledge of Greek is the Ancient Greek he studied in school... and his speech is represented by a kind of Ye Olde Butchered English.
• All the dialogue in Anne McCaffrey's Catteni series is rendered in English; however, early in the first book, one of the characters is giving out orders, and the narrator specifically notes that one of the words in his speech is in English. It is later stated that everyone actually speaks a creole of four or five different languages.
• The characters in Israel Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto use up to four different languages, with Yiddish most common in the first part and English in the second. Zangwill tells the reader who is speaking what when, but also gives some characters Funetik Aksents when they're speaking English instead of Yiddish, German, or Hebrew.
• The City in the Middle of the Night has a foreword explaining that the novel was originally found documents written in Xiosphanti and Argelan, the languages spoken on the planet, and were translated into what the novel calls "Peak English." It's indicated that sometimes the characters are speaking either Xiosphanti or Argelan when it's important to their character development. Xiosphanti is apparently an incredibly complex language that has particles indicating the time of day that it is when speaking, the speaker's social status, and the listener's social status or occupation, and sometimes this is mentioned in the text, e.g. "He spoke to us as if we were laborers and he was a manager."
• About half of all the conversations in Cloud of Sparrows are in English, and the other half are stated to be in Japanese, though it's all rendered in English. At one point, Genji greets Emily and Stark, and Emily apologises to him for not speaking his language. Genji then turns to Hidé and remarks, in Japanese, on how they think he was speaking Japanese, all of which we read in English. The author gives us a couple of instances in which Genji's heavy accent is explicitly represented, but for the most part leaves it up to the reader to figure out which language they're supposed to be speaking.
• The Conqueror books represent Mongolian, Chinese, Arabic, Pashto, Russian, and Korean as English. It also occasionally mentions when characters are using Chinese or Arabic as a lingua franca.
• Author Bernard Knight is upfront in acknowledging in his forewords that The Crowner John Mysteries use a translation convention: explaining that the languages spoken in Exeter at the time would have been a mix of Norman French, Saxon, medieval Latin and Cornish, none of which would be comprehensible to a modern English speaker.
• The Dagger Of Kamui: Despite being a globe-hopping adventurer, Kamui never has a language barrier issue. Everyone he meets is fluent in Japanese.
• Dark Days at Drumshee, set during the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland in the 1600s, is written in English. But it's assumed that Alys and her family speak in Irish when they're in their private home, as there is mention of how good Alys's English is (allowing her to be hired as the nursemaid for Conor O'Brien's children). It's specified when a character is speaking English, so the reader can assume the other characters are always speaking Irish.
• Played with in Despoilers of the Golden Empire. All of the names of the characters and institutions in the story are translated into their Germanic/English equivalents. Unlike most examples of this trope, this is actually done to deliberately mislead the audience, as the reader would instantly recognize the characters and institutions if they went untranslated (or in some cases, if they were translated less directly). For example, there is the Universal Assembly, more commonly called the Catholic Church — Catholic means "all-embracing, universal", and ekklesia, the Greek word from which the Ecclesia used in the Latin name of the Catholic Church comes, means assembly or congregation.
• The language they're speaking on Dinotopia is never detailed; but the first book describes it as a creole based on the languages of humans wrecked on the island. It apparently contains a significant number of words from English, French, and German; which helps Arthur and Will Denison as they learn it.
  • However; all of the text written in the Dinotopian script used in the books is current English, with the letters swapped one-to-one for the footprint characters.
• Tim Powers's novel The Drawing of the Dark applies Translation Convention to 16th-century Italian and German dialects (the main language of the story), Old Norse, Welsh, Latin, and several other tongues. An added twist is that the main character himself is subject to this trope; he doesn't actually "know" most of the languages he gets involved with, but he understands them anyway. As you might expect, there is a plot-based reason for this: he's a reincarnation of an ancient hero, who speaks several dead languages but no contemporary ones.
• The Empirium Trilogy: There are several languages mentioned throughout the series with many characters stated to be speaking a specific one; one character may be speaking Celdarian at first before switching to Common, for instance. Everything the characters say, regardless of which language they're speaking, is completely legible to the reader.
• Applies to all the Fighting Fantasy books. Of particular note, in the book Sword of the Samurai, the reader plays a samurai from Hachiman, and all the dialogue is rendered in English. In the later The Crimson Tide, you play an orphaned farm child in the Isles of the Dawn. Again, all dialogue is represented in English - until you meet a group of samurai guarding the Hachiman ambassador, and are completely unable to understand what they are saying.
• Invoked In-Universe in John M. Ford's The Final Reflection in it's Framing Device that the story is a historical novel set around forty years before the time of Star Trek: The Original Series. In the foreword to the fictional book the author states:
  For clarity's sake, certain Klingon technical terms have been translated into their Federation Standard equivalents: thus "warp drive", "transporter, "disruptor" instead of the more literal "anticurve rider", "particle displacer", "vibratory destructor" (most literally: the "shake-it-till-falls-apart-tool").
• In Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, many of the characters are polyglots, which is implied to be par for the course of residents in such a crossroads of cultures. The main characters run through a wide range of languages, which are all rendered as English.
• It can be assumed that the characters of the Girls of Many Lands series that are set in non-English countries—e.g. Cécile, Leyla, Spring Pearl, and Saba—are not speaking in English; the only characters that do natively are Isabel and Kathleen. The books intersperse English with the native language and glossaries in the back define words from any other languages used.
• In The Grey Horse, set in Ireland, the characters are usually speaking Connacht Irish rather than English. All the dialogue is presented in English, with the narrator indicating which language is being spoken and, where relevant, how badly.
• Harry Potter
  • In the first book/film, when Harry talks to the snake we read/hear them both speaking English (aside from the word "amigo", used by the snake). Even Harry doesn't realise until the following story, where it's a plot point, that he was actually speaking Parseltongue. Even in the second book Parseltongue is represented as English. It's only in the second MOVIE that it's represented as a different language. This is because the books, while in third person, are told from Harry's point of view. Harry couldn't tell the difference between Parseltongue and English, thus neither can we. This can be seen easily in a scene later in the book where Harry is trying to speak Parseltongue to open the Chamber of Secrets, but since he doesn't know when he's speaking Parseltongue, it takes him a few tries. Every try, including the successful one, is written as "open" in English in the book. The movie doesn't have this because the movie is completely third person, and is not connected to Harry. Also, when Harry tells a snake "Get away from him!", all observers hear it as hissing and spitting.
  • In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, while watching a flashback of the Gaunt house, Harry finds it odd that the Ministry of Magic official cannot understand the Gaunts when, to Harry, they're speaking very clearly. It's not until Dumbledore points it out that Harry realizes they're speaking Parseltongue and can begin to separate the hissing from the speaking.
  • In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry meets a snake magically disguised as a woman and does not realize it, even when they exchange a few words/hisses, because he still does not spontaneously perceive the difference between English and Parseltongue.
• Harry Turtledove's books render all dialogue in English when everyone present can understand whatever language is being spoken, though he typically makes an effort to replicate the real language's grammar and syntax.
• Hayven Celestia: As well as the languages of the alien protagonists being written in English, the books also use translation convention in the illustrations. The text describes the Geroo and other species as emoting with their ears, as they lack the facial muscles to do so with their mouths. The illustrations, however, show them expressing with their mouths for the reader's convenience.
• In Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, the protagonist and his family are poor Jewish immigrants in New York's Lower East Side. Their Yiddish (their native language) is rendered in somewhat formal and literary English (e.g. "I'm pleading with you as with Death!"), though they are not literary or cultivated people. What people say in English (the Jewish immigrants' and others), on the other hand, is given with thick accents, with lots of phonetic spellings. This is to make the Yiddish seem normal and natural, and the English alien and threatening.
• The world of Velgarth in the Heralds of Valdemar series is rather full of different languages, and the language being spoken (in English for the reader) is generally assumed to match the nationality of the speaker unless stated otherwise. It's no wonder telepathy is a common feature of the books.
• Played straight in His Dark Materials with the alien mulefa, who do learn a small amount of English, and with a few Siberian or Himalayan characters in the third book - however, everyone else seems to actually speak English. You can Hand Wave this with the angel characters easily, but when it's many, many humans over many, many different universes, one of which is specifically given an Italian/Mediterranean feel, it becomes harder to believe. One scene in the second book does note that Lee Scoresby and a Nordic-equivalent have to try out about six different languages with each other before they find one they're both comfortable in. Their conversation is still represented as English for the reader.
• J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth works: All of our real-world languages do not exist in Middle-earth, and so the common Translation Convention applies. When not convention-translated, names and speech make use of Tolkien's constructed languages, or also of one of the real-world languages used as stand-ins for a fictional one (done to convey the relation of the respective 'proper' languages). Concerning the latter use: The lingua franca of the Third Age (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings), "Westron" (aka the "Common Speech"), is always rendered as Modern English in the texts, as it is the POV characters' language. Others are regularly replaced by stand-in languages based on their relationship to Westron: Rohirric language by Anglo-Saxon/Old English (as it is an archaic version of Westron), and the language used by the Dwarves and the Men of Dale by Old Norse. Information on what these languages 'really' look like can only be found in additional texts. E.g.: Bilbo and Frodo Baggins' actual, 'non-translated' names are Bilba and Maura Labingi (yes, the 'real' hobbit names have masculine endings in -a, feminine in -e and -o).
  • He even does this with place-names. He wanted some places to have names that seemed homey, familiar (because they were in the language of the Hobbits, the viewpoint characters) and others to have mysterious-sounding names, because they were in languages unrelated to Westron (like the Elven or Dwarven languages or the Black Speech); occasionally, we hear two different names for the same place. If he'd left the place-names untranslated, they all would have sounded equally foreign to English readers—"Karningul," for example, is no more familiar-sounding to us than "Imladris". So he translated the Westron place-names into English-derived equivalents, e.g. rendering "Karningul" as "Rivendell".
  • We are told that in Westron, as in most European languages other than English, there are two forms of the second person pronoun, one used for polite address (vos, you), and one used to those with whom one is intimate or familiar (tu, thou). But as the polite pronouns had been lost in the Hobbitish dialect of Westron, the hobbits gave to speakers of more standard dialects a misleading impression that they were on close terms with very important people like Elrond and Galadriel, though this impression is lost in the English “translation” of the Lord of the Rings. (See the Appendix “On translation”, to LOTR.)
    • Curiously, many translations to languages that do make distinction between familiar and polite address nevertheless had the Hobbits use the polite address with these important people. The Finnish translators, for example, noted that using the familiar form made the scenes either unintentionally comical or apparently poorly translated to the reader.
    • Though Tolkien does not usually attempt to represent the formal/familiar distinction in the English text — simply using "you" throughout — in a few places he uses "thou" to indicate a sudden or unexpected use of the familiar pronoun. E.g. Éowyn at one point expresses her affectionate feelings for Aragorn by calling him "thee". The Witch-king and the Mouth of Sauron both use the informal "thou" as an expression of contempt (though Éowyn replies to the Nazgûl-lord with "you" — in Middle-earth heroes are unfailingly polite, even when threatening death on their enemies). Similarly, Denethor starts scornfully "thou"ing Gandalf during his rant just before he kills himself. (Confusingly, Tolkien sometimes also uses thou/thee forms to represent poetic or ceremonial language; consulting his notes on the topic may be necessary to determine what meaning a particular use of "thou" is meant to communicate.)
  • Similarly, in The Silmarillion, it is presumed that the characters converse in their native languages — most commonly one of Tolkien's Elvish languages, Quenya or Sindarin depending on the culture and time period. Names of characters, locations, clans and so on are given in the original languages, though some of them are given translations directly in the text, and most other translations of names can be found in supplemental materials.
  • Tolkien actually slips up at one point. The tower of Orthanc is cited as a double-language pun. It means "Mount Fang" in Sindarin (Grey Elvish), and that meaning can be traced in the untranslated constructed language. It also means "cunning mind" in Rohirric—and it must mean that in the original untranslated Rohirric, because its presence in original Sindarin means that this is original untranslated word. But it also means "cunning mind" in Anglo-Saxon. So "Orthanc" means the same thing in two different languages that are supposedly unrelated—a remarkable coincidence.
• In Hunter's Moon, Animal Talk is translated as every animal speaking in different human languages. Foxes (the main species) speak English, badgers speak German, cats speak French, etc. Animals of the same family speak in related tongues, such as dogs (dogs and foxes are distantly related) speaking broken English.
• A similar example occurs in the Discworld book Interesting Times, where the level of understanding between different languages of characters is reflected in how literal the text is, including translating names, leading to such name gems as the characters Pretty Butterfly, Six Beneficial Winds, and One Big River.
  • This is, of course, a gag that started with the first Agatean to appear in the books, Twoflower.
  • In another Discworld book, Jingo, the dialogue of the Klatchians using their own language in front of Morporkian speakers is simply English in a different font. The words "En al sams la Laisa" are not translated until later, to preserve a joke. (The translation turns out to be "The Place Where the Sun Shineth Not".)
  • When Carrot speaks Klatchian his accent isn't perfect, so some letters are still in the usual font.
  • Also note that Klatchian is in no way exactly identical to Arabic.
  • It is, in fact, a frequently recurring joke in the Discworld books that the languages are basically schoolboy-pidgin versions of their real-world counterparts. Pidgin Latin the most frequently seen. Pratchett uses approximations of the languages that are almost Latin, or Arabic, or French, but with "Blind Idiot" Translation in effect so we get the jokes in the other languages.
  • In Pyramids, there's a footnote to the effect that Ptaclusp's concern that his accidentally two-dimensional son will spend the rest of his life "sleeping cheaply in hotel trouser-presses" is a rather loose translation, as Ptaclusp's language doesn't even have words for "hotel" or "trousers". It does, oddly, have a word for "press for barbarian leg-coverings".
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: In The Colour of Magic, when Rincewind is transported to Roundworld, he thinks the language spoken by an American airline crew sounds "vaguely Hublandish", suggesting his native Morporkian is being translated for the reader, just like BeTrobi when he talks to Twoflower (until that point gets forgotten). Later books imply, to a greater or lesser extent, that Morporkian and English are in fact almost identical, although the routes they took are sometimes different. (It's all but confirmed in The Science of Discworld and sequels, and explicitly stated in the Discworld Roleplaying Game.)
• Isaac Asimov:
  • The entire second section of The Gods Themselves, told about and by Starfish Aliens. The Earth/Moon language used in the other two sections may also be an example.
  • "The Hazing": The dialogue and narration appears in English, but at least three different languages are recognized as being used based on mutual unintelligibility. The Earth words "god" and "devil" don't translate to Galactic, and the sophomores use a different language aboard ship to hide their conversation from the freshmen from Earth (who do understand Galactic).
  • Pebble in the Sky: When Joseph Schwartz travels tens of thousands of years into the future, he finds that English has changed far too much to be comprehensible. The narration from Schwartz's perspective maintains this obfuscation until he learns their modern English, at which point everyone is speaking in English as we know it.
  • Robots and Empire: Daneel and Giskard speak to each other using only a few words instead of complex sentences; this is "translated" to English for the reader.
  • "Search by the Mule": The Lemony Narrator chooses to Lampshade the use of this trope; the Second Foundation has trained in psychology to such a degree that they're practically telepathic. The story uses standard dialogue to represent meaningful gestures and cryptic sentence fragments. The description of how much detail we are missing verges on Bizarre Alien Senses.
    Speech as known to us was unnecessary. A fragment of a sentence amounted almost to long-winded redundancy. A gesture, a grunt, the curve of a facial line - even a significantly timed pause yielded informational juice.
    
• Robert Graves' novel I, Claudius, notionally written in first-person by Claudius, is explained in the foreword to be written in Greek. This explains why Claudius explains the meaning and derivation of certain Latin words, particularly characters' names.
  • Also an example of Shown Their Work — someone who studied the period would know that a historical biography would have been written in Greek, not Latin, well into the 'Roman' era in Rome itself (rather like such a book being written in Latin, not English, in Mediaeval England- it was still considered the language of learning and more widely read).^note For example, the second-century Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his personal Meditations in Greek.
• Lampshaded many times in the Khaavren Romances, purportedly translated by Steven Brust from the originals by Paarfi of Roundwood. The beginning of each novel contains a translator's note apologising for using "he", "him" and "his" in place of gya, and states that the alternative was a lot of "he-or-she" constructs throughout the novels. A short piece near the end of the volumes consists of a conversation between Brust and Paarfi in which Paarfi lambasts and berates Brust for this and other changes, including the title.
• Rudyard Kipling makes an interesting use of different styles of English to represent several languages, particularly noticeable in the novel Kim. Here characters who speak Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tibetan or Pashtu as their native language will often be shown speaking English brokenly and with a bit of a Funetik Aksent, but when they switch to accent-free English the reader can tell they are actually speaking in the language they are accustomed to most. There are also a few other tell-tale signs, for instance Hindi-rendered-as-English will appear a little more archaic, most notably for including "thou" and "thee" as well as "you" in order to reproduce the distinction between formal and informal address that most languages other than English have. Also, sometimes there are slight changes in vocabulary, e. g. certain special words are replaced by non-English equivalents and near-equivalents ("pultoon" for "regiment", "topkhana" for "artillery") or even by an English synonym (for instance, Kim overhears a British officer saying "this is not a war, it is a punishment" in English, and later reports that in Urdu or Hindi as "this is not a war, it is a chastisement"). And there are also instances where Kipling renders something in English, but also remarks that in the "vernacular" the statement includes a pun that is not present in the English translation.
• In some of the Left Behind books, the authors make it clear that the characters are using several different languages despite the fact that we very rarely read any foreign words.
• Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan, is written from the point of view of two people. Some chapters show the view of Deryn, who only speaks English (and learns some bits of German later in the books), the other chapters tell the story from the view of Alek, who's mother tongue is German, but also speaks English, French and Hungarian fluently. However, the whole book is written in English (or the language it's translated to). Most time, the reader is told which language they are speaking.
• Jorge Luis Borges's The Library of Babel describes the alphabet as having 22 letters. It was originally written in Spanish, however, which has 27 letters. But one of the only exact excerpts from one of the books is "Oh tiempo tus pirámides" ("O time thy pyramids")—and the presence of accent marks is not in the description given. Towards the beginning of the story, librarians are also described debating over exactly which language the perceived message of a certain book is even in, if any. Whatever language the narrator's speaking and the infinite books use the script of, it definitely isn't the same one as in the story's text.
• Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series has the characters all speaking in English, but the language will be referred to as Latin or Greek by in-universe characters.
• In the Skyrider series by Melisa Michaels, Belter pidgin is a language derived from several languages of the early migrants. This is rendered as something resembling Hawaiian pidgin. The narrator freely admits that she's translating it for our benefit.
• Compare and contrast that one particular preface at the start of each of his Mission Earth series of books is signed as being written by a machine translator (not technically a Translator Microbes system) created solely to be responsible for giving us the English version of the text. The MT openly wonders (largely safe from comprehension by the alien race allegedly responsible for publishing the book in the first place) why and how he is making such a translation, given that the very next Preface written prior to that book's main text (and thus also being translated by the MT for our benefit) is an official statement that the story within is entirely fictional and that the planet Earth (and thus the English language itself) does not actually exist. This bothers the MT, for rather obvious existensial reasons.
• The books of Umberto Eco are written in Italian and translated to English by William Weaver. In The Name of the Rose this trope is invoked in an interesting way - the narrator explains he has translated the text from the original language for the benefit of the reader, but to Italian of course. So someone reading the book in anything other than Italian is reading a book which has been translated to Italian and then translated to English for the ease of the reader.
• In Nation, all the characters' dialogue is written in English, however it is made clear from characters' mutual incomprehension that they are speaking different languages.
• Neal Stephenson:
  • Anathem contains characters who speak several different forms of the same language, due to being in monastic seclusion for varying periods of time. These are all translated as English, but with various nonsense words inserted to simulate the relations between the languages—e.g., "anathem" is used for a word which means something like "anthem" in older languages, and something like "anathema" in newer languages. One major plot point in the novel is foreshadowed by a character whose name is given as a phonetic spelling of "Jules Verne"—it turns out that he's actually from Earth, French, and named after the original Verne.
  • Also found in Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle. The latter in particular makes extensive use of it: large parts of the book are set in France with everyone speaking French, and other large parts of the book have several characters speaking a pidgin called Sabir. The characters often reference what language they're speaking, just to make sure the readers get it.
• Nightfall (1990), by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg: The foreword explains the reasoning behind applying English words for things that were not in English, such as using "miles" for distance rather than the more alien "vorks".
  ...We could have told you that our character paused to strap on his quonglishes before setting out on a walk of seven vorks along the main gleebish of his native znoob, and everything would have seemed ever so much more thoroughly alien. But it also would have been ever so much more difficult to make sense out of what we were saying, and that did not seem useful.
• In The Night Watch, Anton read the Treaty to Egor. In the English translation, the Treaty is, naturally enough, written in English, but Anton mentions it's the official Russian translation.
• Annemarie in Number the Stars, thinks to herself on how the German soldiers have not learned "our language", Danish, despite occupying the country for two years.
• The Occupation Saga: Most of the books' dialogue is ostensibly in the Shil'vati Common Tongue Shil, which main character Jason was required to learn as a second language in school and is conversant in.
• One Nation, Under Jupiter: Everyone is actually speaking Latin.
• Peter Pan once had a conversation with a Neverbird, who, naturally, spoke 'Neverbird.' The two had quite a screaming match, not being able to understand each other. (The scene really makes no sense in the stage play unless you've read the book first. But it was still pretty funny.)
• The Planiverse contains an in-universe example. Whatever fluke allowed the computer to contact Yendred also translates between English and his unnamed language, in somewhat scrambled sentences. His actual language is spoken with hisses, squeaks, and choking noises.
• The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks has a rather long translation note on the proper rendering of the pronouns for a race that has three genders. Saying that Marain (the language of the protagonist) has one pronoun for males, females, sexless creatures, robots, and anything else, but saying the pronoun for the third gender will be translated as whatever is most appropriate in your primitive language.
  • Also, in Banks's novella "State of the Art" the story is recounted in a letter to a scholar of Earth culture and translated by a (very advanced AI) drone. The drone complains at the end that the narrator insisted on using untranslatable Marain words, some of which would need three-dimensional diagrams to explain.
• In The Queen's Thief book Thick as Thieves, Kamet is a Polyglot for five languages but spends most of the book speaking and thinking in Mede, as he's lived most of his life in Medea. This is used later when he addresses Attolis with the archaic for "Great King" and the whole court gasps. It's not until we see Kamet's signature on a letter that the reader knows that what he actually said was the word Annux, which means a king over other kings—and which has been established in previous books as a title of mythic significance.
• Alan Garner's novel Red Shift is split between three time periods in the same part of northern England - the then current 1970s, the mid-1600s, and early Roman Britain in the first century AD. The first two groups are left untranslated, the present day characters obviously speaking modern English, and the 17th century ones speaking a more-or-less accurate dialect of early modern English. However, the Roman characters - a squad of low-ranking soldiers - are translated into a slang-heavy form of modern English reminiscent of Vietnam-era US military slang.
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Notwithstanding the rare flashback to Nanao's time in Yamatsu, almost all the dialogue in the series is in Yelglish (Fantasy English) but is rendered in the localization language. This leads to oddities such as characters in the original Japanese referring to each other with the English-language honorifics "Mister" and "Miss" transliterated into katakana, rather than using Japanese Honorifics (with the exception of Oliver calling his cousins/foster siblings Gwyn and Shannon "onee-san" and "nee-san").
• The novels of Bernard Cornwell often make use of this trope, particularly those set in a distant historical period. The Saxon Stories uses modern English to represent both Old English and Old Norse, while the Grail Quest series uses it to represent Middle English, Middle French and medieval Occitan.
  • Both averted and played straight in The Warlord Chronicles; averted in that the narrator actively asserts the text, effectively an in-universe autobiography, to be a translation, written in Old English rather than the Old Brythonic which supposedly comprises the bulk of the dialogue, while played straight in that both this and the Old English dialogue are rendered in Modern English.
• The Afterword to Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer wittily discusses the difficulties involved in rendering into English a text composed in a language "that has not yet achieved existence".
• The Sabrina the Teenage Witch novelization 'Age of Aquariums', has a sequence where Sabrina has to get information from a witch in China. The narration says that she has to cast a complicated spell so that the other witch will hear Chinese when Sabrina speaks, and she will hear English when the Chinese witch does.
• Shattered Continent gives a built-in translation for Imperial German when heard by someone who understands it. Caroline starts out without it, having to muddle through based on her knowledge of two of the (many) root languages and reading body language, with the convention not kicking back in until she gets more comfortable with it. The language of magic, on the other hand, receives no translation unless you also have a high aptitude for magic, and even then it translates into Esperanto.
• In James Clavell's Shogun, the narrative makes clear that the characters are speaking in various languages — mostly Portuguese, but also Japanese, Spanish, and Latin — but all the dialogue is rendered in English. In the TV miniseries adaptation, all the dialogue which is really taking place in Portuguese is rendered in modern English. In moments of intimacy, the two main characters speak in Latin; this is rendered in archaic English, recognizable by the use of singular second-person pronouns (thou) and the "eth" ending.
• Solomon Kane will occasionally make note of the fact that while we're reading conversations in English, for ease of reading, Solomon is actually speaking to people in their native tongues (this is particularly evident when dealing with the Arab slavers in The Footfalls Within).
• A Song of Ice and Fire is written in a third-person limited perspective which changes viewpoint character by chapter. Languages understood by the viewpoint character are rendered in English, and the specific language being spoken is only brought up by the narration if it becomes relevant (such as when Dany pretends not to understand High Valyrian in order to hear a slave trader's real words instead of the sanitized version presented by his translator). Westerosi alone is always rendered as English, with no associated Conlang or nonsense vocabulary.
• In the sci-fi novel The Sparrow, and it's sequel, the alien languages are presented this way in the text after a time-jump following first contact when the humans begin learning their language.
  • Several characters are explicitly THERE because they are linguistic experts adept in both the study and teaching of languages.
  • However, EARTH languages are sometimes left untranslated if/because the relevant POV character doesn't speak the language.
• Diane Duane used this trope a few different times in her Star Trek books featuring Romulan characters, the Rihannsu series. In the first book, My Enemy, My Ally, Duane has the main character Ael speaking to her subordinate on her own ship in the Romulan (or Rihannsu) language, but her own thoughts and the exposition are all in English. By the time she leaves the ship and reaches the Enterprise, she's using a subdermal translator, and her speech as translated as English except when a word without an English equivalent (thrai, for instance) is used. The next book in the series of five, The Romulan Way is actually set on Romulus (or, to give it its "proper" name, ch'Rihan), but apart from local expressions and the aforementioned words above, everything is in English until erstaz prisoner of war McCoy arrives, leading to lots of Translation Convention fun and frolic.
• Similar to the comic book example above, Timothy Zahn uses brackets around English to depict alien languages in his Star Wars Legends novels. In one novel that features two separate aliens, he depicts one alien language with single brackets and a j following every instance of the letter i. The second alien species merely has double brackets around its speech.
• Subverted in the second Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz. When the Scarecrow greets Jack Pumpkinhead, Jack objects to the Scarecrow that he cannot understand him, because the two of them are from different countries. The Scarecrow agrees that this must be the case, and calls for an interpreter: Jellia Jamb. Jellia has great fun mistranslating each statement made to the other, with both the Scarecrow and Jack objecting verbally to her lies, until she bursts out laughing. She explains to the two that, despite being from different countries, they speak the same language. They both feel very silly about the incident.
• The cats in Tailchaser's Song generally have their Conlang "translated" into English. For example, their word for "fish" is "Cef'az" and translates to "water-cat", their word for "bird" is "Fla-fa'az" and translates to "run-jump-cat", and their word for "friend" is "cu'nre" which translates to "heart-brother". The book also discusses cat pronouns such as "iri'le" (literally "many-me" and the equivalent of "we") and "iri" ("I").
• The Mrdini language in the Talents series is represented by a different font. The actual language, which contains no vowels, is described as sounding like clicking and clacking, with a couple of whistles thrown in. The only actual Mrdini speech we see are their names (like "Prtglm"), but even then the human characters come up with pet names for 'Dinis they know personally ("Gil" and "Kat" for "Grl" and "Ktg").
• In the book Seven Underground Kings from Alexander Volkov's Tales of the Magic Land series, Ellie (Volkov's equivalent of Dorothy) protests when her cousin Fred calls her "devchonka", a derogatory Russian word for "girl", insisting on the neutral "devochka" instead. However, the stylistic difference between these two words only exists in Russian, not English, which the American characters are presumed to be speaking.
• In The Talisman, everyone in The Territories speaks a different language, including the protagonists when they "flip" there (which is one of the first indicators to Jack that it's not All Just a Dream), but it is always written as English, presumably for the benefit of the reader.
• Done frequently in Tamora Pierce books.
  • In the Tortall Universe, Tortall speaks "Common Eastern" (usually just called Common) and the text notes when the protagonist starts speaking something different, e.g. Kel speaking Yamani. Aly spends most of the Trickster's Duet speaking Kyprish, the language of the Copper Isles, but we see more actual Kyprish in Beka Cooper when Beka is giving commands to her scent hound. And speaking of Beka, her diaries are actually written in a police cypher rather than Common in case they're lost or stolen.
  • We occasionally see untranslated, italicized foreign words in the Circleverse books when the protagonists leave Emelan and are invariably addressed with the local honorific for "mage", or when there are Traders in the room as they have a number of words without direct translation. Otherwise, the narration just lets us know when a language switch happens. Given that Circleverse countries are a lot smaller than Tortall, all the protagonists have to be multilingual.
• Tough Magic plays with this; Holois is intelligent enough to talk, but can only speak in cat noises. However, any character that hangs around her long enough can understand her (With the main character being the best at it, due to his long assoctation with her.), which makes her intent fairly clear; and the narration occasionally provides a translation.
• The Twelve Kingdoms have a completely different language from Japan, but even though two people who speak different languages can't understand each other, it still sounds like both are speaking Japanese. One character merely tells another that they are speaking another language.
  • The central character, Yoko Nakajima, starts off just speaking Japanese, but when she arrives in the other world she is able to speak and understand the language there, even though her two classmates (who have been transported with her) cannot. Oddly, she doesn't seem to notice that she is now magically fluent in a new language. There are others in the world of the Twelve Kingdoms that speak Japanese, either through the same sort of magic or because they too came from Japan, but you can only tell when the Japanese being spoken in the anime is really Japanese and not the language of the Twelve Kingdoms from the context.
• Warrior Cats: All dialogue that the viewpoint characters can understand is rendered as English or the language of translated versions, such as Russian, but they're supposed to be speaking their own language, which has been rather prosaically refered to as "Cat". Likewise, at least some other animals have their own eponymous languages, including "Fox", "Badger", and "Rabbit".
  • Midnight the badger speaks all four of the above languages at least, albeit with a healthy dose of You No Take Candle.
• Wasp (1957): All conversations in the alien Sirian language are in English, but a number of Sirian slang terms remain (the swearword "soko", "yar" and "nar" which mean yes and no, and the Verbal Tic "hi?")
• Watership Down is about rabbits and makes note that the book is simply "translating" rabbit talk. Often times, the translation streamlines the terms for human convenience. For example, rabbits can only count to four, with every number after four just being "hrair" (a thousand). Fiver's actual name, Hrairoo, literally translates to "Little Thousand".
• The Watchmaker of Filigree Street: Once Thaniel learns Japanese, Japanese dialogue is all rendered in English and just noted in the text. In the sequel when everyone goes to Japan, this continues; characters speaking informally are written as if they're speaking modern English, despite the Victorian setting, to better show how important the different levels of formality in Japanese are.
• The Wheel of Time has a really cool scene in which Mat and Birgitte are speaking after Mat discovers that Birgitte is the heroine of legend, and he denies having his own secrets. She's not fooled, at which point she says, "Nosane iro gavane domorakoshi, Diynen�d�ma�purvene?" (Speak we what language, Sounder of the Horn?) and both Mat and the reader realize that the entire conversation was in the Old Tongue, which makes Mat's denial laughable. The whole conversation is done by Translation Convention and only works in print, but if you read it again, it's incredible because all the dialogue is written subtly with the the Old Tongue's poetic syntax and out-of-place idioms.
• All of Brandon Sanderson's books in The Cosmere make use of this, though attention is only drawn to it when it is relevant to the plot or setting.
  • In Words of Radiance (book two of The Stormlight Archive) a worldhopper from Nalthis (Warbreaker) comes to Roshar and uses strange idioms relating to colors that confuse natives (and possibly readers). Although there is a lot more color related language in Warbreaker, these same unusual idioms never appear, so they were translated appropriately, since whoever was listening would understand them.
  • Both Oathbringer and The Bands of Mourning feature characters using respective magic systems to communicate with people who speak different languages. Regardless of which language is being spoken it is all in English to the reader, provided the character who's point of view we have can understand it.
  • Sanderson has also noted that this is also what happens with well done book translations in real life. Since his are written in English, when a translator runs across a pun or saying they will try to create a pun that works in their language. The idea of "This character is making a wordplay quip" is left intact, even though the specifics of what is said are changed.
• Tony Rothman's novel The World Is Round has a direct in-text note that the aliens only share some commonality with humans (such as bipedalism or limbs) they aren't actually speaking English, their language has been translated for ease of understanding.
• Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union concerns an Alternate History where Jewish refugees from WWII were allowed to settle in Alaska, and took up Yiddish as a primary language. It's therefore assumed that everyone in the story is speaking Yiddish, except when specifically noted that someone said something "in American".

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