: Credibility of using English in non-English-speaking worlds In the Magic Tree House series, two ordinary English-speaking kids travel to different faraway lands through a portal. Every character

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In reality, if you found an ancient scroll written in Old English from a 1000 years ago, it would probably still be unintelligible to the modern person!

If you worry about it, I'd give your characters some minor tech, talent, or magic to pave over it; a translator phone app, or a linguist that translates something that rhymes in ancient Greek to something that rhymes in modern English.

Or just ignore it, it is the kind of minor point an editor might want you to address, but might not: Good authors are paying so much attention to having every word be right and make sense they notice real issues (like this one) at a far higher rate than actual readers do. You may just be hypersensitive.

If the rest of your story is a good read, then your editor is trained to know what is important to readers that you should address, what might drop Suspension of Disbelief. And what issues are unlikely to cost the publisher any sales or result in a bad professional critique (same thing, costs sales).

If my editor flags something like that as too implausible or too convenient, then I definitely want to address it somehow. I would probably use a linguist, say this thing is a rhyme in ancient Egyptian that translates into non-rhyming English. If the fact that it rhymes is a clue, so it makes a character think of some other rhyming word that solves the puzzle, it would be harder for the character to come up with an answer. But that could be a good thing! He asks the linguist which words rhyme, for other words that rhyme in Ancient Egyptian, and thereby intuits the correct answer. The linguist does not have to be a part of the crew; it could be some university dude that looks at a picture of the scroll and does this work for the crew remotely by iPhone.

Of course, you don't have to worry about whether those are true rhymes in Ancient Egyptian; there are only a handful of people on earth (perhaps none) that might know enough Ancient Egyptian to be offended by you taking that particular fictional liberty.

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For a work composed in English but with characters who are speaking another language, I think it's fine to use not just English but idiomatic English. I've seen this in a number of historical novels that take place anywhere from Sparta to Nazi Germany.

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Perhaps you could invent some magic device that translates everything automatically for the characters, like the babble fish of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or the Tardis in Dr. Who...

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Consider such works as 'Lord of the Rings'. Do you really think that anyone beyond the Shire would speak English, and yet they all do? (Yes there are other languages, but consider how they are introduced and used.)

Then think about sci-fi novels: set in the future and on other worlds and yet the language is still English that we can understand today (consider Shakespeare only died 400 years ago and how much the language has changed). Readers accept English without question.

I don't know the Magic Tree House and so can't comment on it specifically, but I do know that adults accept English speaking as the norm: see Star Trek and Doctor Who.

You just have to make it believable.

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