: Re: The use of footnotes to translate foreign words in a novel I'm writing a fantasy novel and one of my characters speaks in English, but sometimes utters single words in an ancient dead language,

@Pierce369

Vote Up Vote Down

Footnotes are sometimes a good solution and sometimes a bad one; it depends greatly on the tone you want to set. In fact, I'd say the question you want to answer is why your characters should speak another language at all. (The solution with italics would be very confusing—I don't think I've ever seen it done.)

Footnotes will be a momentary distraction to the reader, but will let you specify the word exactly. Terry Pratchett used them extensively, and you can tell he would sometimes make up a word just for the sake of having a footnote that explained it. Guards! Guards! has quite a few examples of this. However, when he uses considerably more made-up words in The Fifth Elephant, he instead uses them with no explanation, or with minor explanation from other characters in the text. They're used there to emphasise that there is a language barrier, and translating everything for the reader would not help with that.

Looking more broadly, in my experience fantasy authors will typically leave the meaning of the terms up to context, or explain them in the narration. If you'd like to see some examples, Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss both invent quite a few words. J.R.R. Tolkien is another prominent example, although he does not use them in dialogue all that much and mostly sticks to a fairly small set that are used frequently (despite having considerably more available to him).

Something to keep in mind is that your situation is very different than when people insert terms from some existing language into their book, as Russian authors in the 19th century tended to do with French. These will often be translated in footnotes these days, but it was assumed the reader would know what they are when the books were written. As such, I would be careful of looking at these examples.

EDIT: Oops, I hadn't realised you used a real language—though I wouldn't expect your readers to know Sanskrit, so the situation is pretty much the same. In this case, it sounds like you want your character to appear strange, even by the standards of that world. Adding footnotes to explain things wouldn't improve that effect, so there's no need to. If anything the character says has to be understood (important directions, etc.), you can have a character translate it—after all, supposedly there's someone else who also cares about what it means.

(0)

Login to post a comment!