Promulgating Opacity In The Manufacture of Perceptive Understanding

Poet Isabella Wang made some controversial comments about the Mandarin words she puts in her work (and the lack of translative footnotes):

There was a thread attached, but due to the backlash she got (chill out, people) she locked her account up. There was some “Ugh WHITE MEN!” signaling there, but the extent to which all words ought to be understood by the audience (in this case, reader) is an interesting one.

Whether foreign words need footnotes is ultimately a product of whether you want the meaning of the word expressly and accurately understood. It may seem like the answer to that is “yes” but it depends. Sometimes it doesn’t matter. Sometimes you actively don’t want the words understood. The opacity is the point.

You see this pertaining to issues apart from the actual language being used altogether. But let’s start with language.

In anime (and I believe other foreign-language translations), you often see divergences in translation between the subtitled and dubbed versions. The most common difference is that the dubbed version tends to be much more entry-level when it comes to language whereas the subtitled version relies much more assumptions that the viewer understands at least some of Japanese culture and indeed its language. But also, if they don’t, that’s okay. They figure you will pick it up from context clues. And usually you can. If a exasperated character angry with other people in the scene is going around saying “BAKA! BAKA!” you can tell it’s just an expression of frustration. The proximity of the translations “fool” or “idiot” are unnecessary. But for the dubbed, they want it understood and so will translate it.

When I was listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks, I switched back and forth between the British version and the American version. While I never listened to the same one of each, you could pick up on the differences pretty quickly. They “translated” the American version from English to other English. They made a decision that they wanted to avoid the confusion of unfamiliar words even if they were pretty discernible from context clues. Personally, I preferred the British version partly because I thought the actor was better but also because having them actually say “git” instead of “jerk” gave a better feeling of the story’s setting and it was still familiar enough that it didn’t cause any confusion.

Neither decision is correct, but it’s something you consider the audience for.

I am not familiar with Wang’s writing, but if it comes from a place of authentic Chinese or Chinese-American experience, it does make sense to use the Mandarin words and including footnotes could easily be a distraction to the flow. If an author would rather take a chance that the audience doesn’t understand the word and won’t pick it up in context, that’s a pretty reasonable artistic decision. If people are angry about that they need to chill out. If she is angry that they are missing something because they don’t understand the words and refuse to look it up, she needs to chill out because she is the one that chose to put an unfamiliar word out there and expect the reader to do the work. The more work you assign, the more you have to figure that people won’t do it unless you have a particular dedicated (but in which case probably small) audience. In which case, do you your thing.

Outside of language choice, you often see unfamiliar words deployed precisely because the unfamiliarity says something. For example, you might have a character throwing out a bunch of nonsense jargon and the jargon itself is the point. For example, if you’re on a spaceship and someone says that the bad guys hit their “Central Oscillator”… what is that? doesn’t matter. But it’s central. Given the urgency of the character, important. The fact that they don’t say “carburetor” communicates that you’re dealing with advanced or novel technology. The opacity is the communication.

Likewise, if you have a character that is using long and difficult to understand words, you are communicating something about that character precisely by putting words out there that the reader (or viewer) may not understand. Perhaps the wording conveys a character’s superior intelligence, excellent language skill, or just that they are obnoxious and pretentious. Writers are often told “show don’t tell” and that is a form of showing.

In most of these cases, having a footnote would largely defeat the purpose. Worse, it would undermine it because by presenting the precise definition of the word you are suggesting that precision is necessary when in fact the word is meant to be foreign, represent a vibe, or show us something about the character. The precise definition is actually a distraction from the communication at hand.

In the now-inaccessible thread, Wang talks a bit about how deliberate she is in her deployment of Mandarin, which suggest to some degree that her decision to do so where she does it is itself meant to communicate something. Perhaps a footnote would help, or perhaps it would hurt. It is the author’s call to make that decision, and the reader’s job to decide how they feel about it.