Tjyylli

I'm writing a middle-grade novel in English. I have time-traveling kids from 1995 America who go to Ancient Egypt to join the Exodus. None of the kids speak anything but English (aside from a few words). The people they visit mostly speak Canaanite, an ancient form of Hebrew. (There are other languages there but let's put that aside.)

My big it's a fantasy book for kids for crying out loud handwave is that there is a magical invisible Universal Translator (think Doctor Who, but without any tech). To the kids, everyone's speaking English (though they know this isn't the case). To the locals, the kids speak and understand them just fine (though they might not know all the vocabulary). In reality, everyone's speaking the local language(s), languages the kids retain when they go home.

The locals are folks that love to sing and dance and I plan to put snippets of songs into the book. For some or most of them, I'll just use English. But a few of the songs will come from Jewish liturgy or straight out of the Torah. Or both, like in the case of Mi Chamocha (aka The Song of the Sea), a song of praise that the Hebrews sang after successfully crossing the Red Sea. The lyrics are right in the book of Exodus and it's a song we sing every week in synagogue.

I'd like those songs to be in Hebrew. I may also put in a few non-English words or phrases here and there. There are also some English words the locals will learn as they're non-translatable ("dude!").

I'll write it so that the readers don't have to run for a dictionary. Plenty of translations, etc. But this is a song that every synagogue-attending Jew (and every kid in Hebrew school) will recognize. Some of the words (just the main stanza) need to be from the original. (Note: while all my kids are at least part Jewish, none of them have attended synagogue and they don't know the songs.)

I will use transliteration only and it will be in Biblical Hebrew, which is not the same as modern Hebrew (though they're more or less mutually intelligible) and also not the same as Canaanite (I have no idea how close that one is).

How do I work this? Not just the weaving in of a foreign language but the idea that the rest of the book is written in English, even though they're not speaking English when they're in Egypt and thereabouts.

These are songs, and we learn songs differently from spoken language. Have you ever found yourself singing along to a favorite song in a language you don't even speak, but you've listened to the recording enough to have memorized it? You were almost certainly helped by meter and perhaps rhyme, by the way.

All of this can be true for your kids. No, they don't know the songs from attending synagogue, but they might well have heard them anyway (especially Mi Chamocha). Maybe Grandma likes to sing or Dad has records (remember those?) he used to play a lot or they were around friends practicing for bar mitzvah. They can have been exposed without actually knowing the songs -- and that can be enough to "click" when they hear the ancient Hebrews singing them.

Consider a slight tweak to your universal translator: you hear your primary language until you start to gain some familiarity with the other, and then at that point you hear the other language while still knowing what it says in your head. Your universal translator can thus be something of a teaching tool, which could play a role in the kids retaining the other languages when they get home.

Your writing challenge, then, is to show that these songs are in fact different from other Canaanite songs they might hear in their adventures. Have your characters react to what they're hearing -- mention Grandma or Dad's records or Ben's bar mitzvah or that scene in Prince of Egypt at the theatre or whatever. Show the characters making a connection to the text in its original language, and you can justify them singing that song in that language even if 95% of what they hear is English.

One of my favourite series of books, The Dark is Rising Sequence, has an example I feel might be helpful.

In the last book of the series, three of the main characters are transported from modern day Wales to Wales of a hundred or more years before. At that point in time, obviously, everyone would be speaking Welsh, but to the main characters (and the reader) everything is in English. The characters even go so far as to lampshade it, saying how it sounds like English to them but obviously they themselves must be speaking Welsh just like everyone else from that time period.

However, it's not all English to them for the entire time they're in the past. When it seems that the characters have gained all the knowledge they need from the current conversation with the locals, all of a sudden the switch is turned off and everyone returns to Welsh, leaving the main characters in the dark about what's being said. Then, when what the other people are saying is important to the story again, it's back to English.

Perhaps you could do something like this. Maybe the magic that's taken them to the past lets them understand what's important for them to understand, but trivial information sometimes remains untranslated. So while conversations and songs important to the story (and the narrative in general) is all in English, some songs are not necessary for the characters to understand and therefore are all unintelligible.

My communication rule is: They say what they mean as they intended it – as if all communication came right out of their brain. No phonetic accents or broken English between narrator and reader. That should be clean communication always. I feel like we all have an accent to somebody but not to ourselves, so every character deserves that dignity to communicate with the meaning they intend (not be biased because of an accent or limited vocabulary). It's a suspension of disbelief, but it allows all characters to co-exist on an equal footing.

Where accent or language barrier needs to be expressed, I try to just describe it, rather than imitate it. If it's a story issue it can be emphasized in the feelings and perceptions, so rather than have someone drawl it's about the listener hearing a drawl. Any "othering" is moved to the character's ears, not the reader's mind. If the point is someone being alienated because they can't understand, that is better done with the emotions.

Set some rules, and see if you can avoid explaining. Narrative voice is the hardest part of writing. The strongest thing you can do is have confidence and not draw attention to it.

If you want a worldbuild-y excuse, the kids can have language engrams mapped to their brains (no worse than getting an eye exam). Before the trip they go to the library-language-implant-clinic, and read a few stories and watch a few videos while a computer maps their language centers. It creates new engrams for the foreign words, mapped to their own vocabulary, maybe 8000 - 10,000 words, enough for a day at the marketplace.

A harmless and nearly painless handwavium treatment later, their brains know what the words sound and look like. They read some stories and watch a video in the old language, and yes, they can understand well enough to follow a conversation. In time, these engrams normally fade from lack of use, but it is common to get language engrams for tourism and business conferences.

Your kids will understand the old tongue, but not be able to speak, at first, or as convenient to the plot. Some might be better than others, so they pair up. It could be handwaved or used to generate some conflict or to show how they must adapt once they are stuck there.

I think every kid who ever had to chant or sing in a foreign language at temple would buy into this premise that vocabulary could just be zapped directly into their brain.

Then maybe you have the singing moment and it brings the communication complications to a climax (see Monica's answer) since it is not attached to any engrams it is words they already knew.

And again it is some suspension of disbelief because you are selling the emotions not the lyrics.