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If I didn't have a file of blog prompts, I might have been hard put to come up with a topic this week. We're having an agency inspection at work this week, which involves being "on deck" for most of each day. This morning it also involved getting to work 2 hours earlier than normal. Just feeling a bit more distracted than usual.

Today's topic emerged from my reaction to questions in various on-line writing groups about how to handle "difficult names" (read: names from cultures the reader doesn't share) or how to create or avoid the sort of stilted "forsoothly" language typically associated with medievaloid fantasy. On both of which my basic reaction is: all fiction is translation, it's just a matter of what degree you choose.

Take names as an example. I once served as a historic names consultant for an author writing a "true history of King Arthur" fantasy series. My assignment was to discovered the "historically accurate original Brythonic versions" of the personal names of a wide variety of characters from the Arthuian mythos. This assignment seems relatively simple and straightforward, but it came with two major difficulties, one pragmatic and one structural.

The pragmatic difficulty was that Brythonic personal names tended to be relatively long and polysyllabic and had grammatical endings that -- to a modern English speaker -- tended to make them all sound alike. Maglocunos and Brigomaglos and Catomaglos and Cunotamos sound more alike than Maelgwn and Briafael and Cadfael and Cyndaf...and much more alike than Tom, Dick, and Harry. And that rule of thumb about "beware of any fantasy novel where all the women's names end in "-a"? Hard to avoid that when you're dealing with an older Romance or Celtic language, any more than you can avoid having most of the men's names ending in "-s". So from the point of view of a modern fantasy author, you want a certain amount of "translating" the historically accurate forms of the names into something more distinctive.

The structural problem was that a fairly large proportion of the characters in medieval Arthurian legend don't have names of Brythonic origin. I can't give you the Brythonic form of Galahad and Launcelot because there wasn't one. Some sort of "translation" again was required, either to invent Brythonic-sounding names that the reader would properly connect with the characters, or tracing the literary names back to their (usually Germanic) roots and doing some cultural hand-waving. As I recall, the author I consulted for chose a little of each.

When setting a story in a historic context, especially when using a relatively tight point of view, rather than an omniscient modern-authorial voice, the question of how to handle issues of language and vocabulary must be addressed, if only implicitly.

An author writing in the language of the culture being portrayed--if writing at a distance of no more than a few centuries--has the admirable, if grueling, option of trying to use the historically authentic form of the language for the prose. This is a harder option than one might think. At the most superficial level, where vocabulary is restricted to words known to have been in use at the time (and used in their appropriate meanings) there is at the very least the grunt work of looking up every uncertain word in a historic dictionary to check usage. (Mary Robinette Kowal has blogged about having done this for her Glamourist Histories series, set in an alternate English Regency.) At a deeper level, there are nuances of grammar and usage that can only be practically addressed by a writer who has immersed themself in the literature of the period. (And with the caveat that literature is still at one remove from how people spoke in conversation.)

The farther back in time one goes, the more difficult this approach, both in terms of composition and in terms of reader reception. A reader who can tackle the English of Jane Austen will have more difficulties with the English of Milton, may barely be able to slog through that of Chaucer, and almost certainly will view Beowulf as an entirely foreign language. So if you're setting your historic novel (or historic fantasy) at the time of the Norman Conquest, you're either translating the language of your setting into a more modern form or you're writing for a very small audience.

And, of course, if you're writing about a culture that speaks a different language than your readers, pretty much everything is going to be translated in some fashion. In fact, to include untranslated bits of the language of your setting is to risk fracturing the illusion that the reader is part of that setting. (This is one of the reasons my Alpennian books have so little actual Alpennian language in them. For the characters, the English the books are written in stands in for the Alpennian they would be speaking and thinking. So the inclusion of Alpennian words and phrases would stand out as foreign to them. In general, I've used Alpennian words only when the concept is specific to the culture, as in the case of "armin", or when it appears regularly in proper names, as with "salle".)

Given the essential presence of "translation" in stories set in other times and places, why is there a tendency for historic or fantasy authors to gravitate toward a stilted, formal language? I confess I blame the Bible for a lot of it. As a literary model for stories about long ago and far away, the King James Version probably looms larger in the English-speaking world than any other single influence. (Especially if you factor in its secondary influence through major works based on its style.)

But another factor is an impulse to use formal language when writing about the deeds of kings and heroes, as opposed to the antics of peasants and clowns. This is a model seen clearly in Shakespeare's plays, where class distinctions are reflected in the formality or colloquialism of the language. So to the extent that a modern author is writing "high fantasy" (in the sense of stories concerned with kings and heroes), a stilted formality comes naturally. And that formality may creep over into any sort of historic writing. It's a mistake. Even kings and heroes used contractions in speech, for example, but contractions are one of the things that often feel "too modern" in a story.

Writers trying to break out of this trap will sometimes deliberately use modern slang and idioms for historic settings, if only to reject the authenticity model. This, too, has its consequences for the reader and should be done only with deliberation and intent.

I try to aim for a middle ground. The Alpennia novels are, by definition, "translation". I can't restrict myself to early 19th century Alpennian vocabulary because there is no such thing in any sense of the term. Yet I try to avoid using vocabulary that an average reader (not a specialist!) would immediately consider to be intrusively modern in English, without tying myself up in knots over looking up every single word. After all, does matter if a particular English word was first used in that meaning in 1870, given that I'm not writing about English history? If I were writing an Alpennian story set in the 15th century (which, as it happens, I will be at a later date), would I then need to avoid any English vocabulary dating later than Thomas Mallory? And even careful research won't make everyone happy. During the editing process for The Mystic Marriage, the only words and phrases my editor flagged as "too modern" were ones that had been in use for centuries (in English) by the setting of my novel! Sometimes perception can trump reality.

In the end, an author has to consider what their words communicate, not whether the words are technically "correct" by some particular set of rules. And communication often relies on the work of translation, whether of language or ideas.