Guest Post: On Writing Bilingual Characters by Katja Labonté

I've read her short stories (An Old Fashioned Christmas really feels like it could have been written in the 19th century!); I've read her first standalone novel, A Noble Comfort (The Scarlet Pimpernel meets The Three Musketeers!); and now I have the oppportunity to share with you a wonderful blog post by Katja H. Labonté. I know you'll enjoy it as much as I have!

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Hi, everyone! Katja here, and I’ve come to discuss bilingual characters with y’all. Before you ask my credentials, I’m Québécoise, a.k.a. from Québec, Canada’s francophone province, and bilingual. 😉

When I approached Sarah about a post swap (she wrote an absolutely AMAZING one about WWII that you can find on my blog here—go read it because it’s SPECTACULAR) and she asked me to write a post about bilingual characters, there were a couple things that came to mind.

1) Highlight Differences

​One of the best ways to demonstrate a character’s bilingualism is by focussing on how they talk. And I’m not talking about writing out their accent, because while I love reading that and some people are fantastic at doing it, I’m not, and I have zero tips for you on that topic. Rather, I’m talking about similes, grammatical style, and the other little things that make up language. There are plenty of things we could discuss, but I’ll just cover three to start. 

​Similes/Expressions: When I wrote my nonmagical fantasy retelling A Noble Comfort in 2024, I knew that I wanted to give my world a different flavour by turning the similes and expressions so familiar to anglophones on their heads. So I deliberately sought out French similes instead of English ones. For example, I suppose you’re all familiar with the English simile “deaf as a post.” The French equivalent is “sourd comme un pot”—deaf as a pot. That may not be the best example, because it literally just occurred to me people may have assumed this was a typo, haha (it may serve as a cautionary tale, perhaps?). But the idea remains: tapping into another language’s expressions and similes really helps highlight culture. 

​Grammatical Style: One of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous Sherlock Holmes stories, A Scandal in Bohemia, features an incognito German-speaking client. Holmes is able to discover this by studying the man’s letter, telling Watson, “Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence—‘This account of you we have from all quarters received.’ A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs.” I rest my case.
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​Proverbs/Quotes: A proverb or saying is an excellent window into a culture’s priorities, history, morals, etc. And one culture may have a common saying that simply doesn’t exist in other cultures. They can also be written differently—like how French proverbs rhyme more often than English ones do. I could give so many examples, but here’s one: we all know the English “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” In French, the proverb goes “il n’y a pas de fumée sans feu” (there’s no smoke without fire). Another example: in English, “it never rains but it pours.” In French, there’s “never two without three.” Or in English, you know not to count your chickens before they hatch. In French, you’re warned not to sell the bearskin before you kill the bear!

A bilingual character will probably know poetry, stories, quotes, hymns, and even Bible verses in their first language—my francophone characters, when talking of the Bible, often translate the French words into English because they don’t actually know what the Bible says in English. 

​2) Embrace the Mess

Not all bilingual characters speak broken English. Many people speak fluently, but still retain more or less of their first language. I suppose you’d consider me perfectly fluent, but actually, though I’ve spoken English since babyhood, I struggle sometimes with it just because I don’t live in English, and I don’t hear it outside of the internet. My stories are always examined by beta-readers, who often find all sorts of funny linguistic errors—even though I am a university-trained, certified copyeditor!

An example of this could be my own stories, Act in the Living Present and My Roots Shall Run Down. Although my characters are bilingual and fluent from birth, they still often use a French turn of phrase. For example, they can say something like “run get changed,” a direct translation of how in French, we can say “cours te changer.” Of course in English it would be “run and get changed.” (To be even more French, they could say “run change yourself” because that’s the literal translation.) Once I had betas point out that I made a character close the lights instead of turning them off—because in French, on ferme les lumières: we close the lights.

I’m not Polish, but in my opinion, Sarah did a great job with this in Lighten Our Darkness as Jedrick Ondraski slowly grows stronger in his English. You can also note the difference between his dialogue and his brother Jozef’s in Treasures of Darkness. (And no, Sarah doesn’t know I was going to say this. But seriously, she’s written some of the best bilingual characters I’ve read. Study them.)

Let your characters speak bad English. It helps. ;)
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3) Don’t Translate

There are some words that one language has and another just doesn’t. I’ve used several in my writing--justement, for example. It sort of means “exactly,” except not. It’s not translatable. So I let my characters say it, because I would. It’s the word they mean, and they don’t have an English equivalent. Other times, someone knows a word in their own language but not in another. I had one character say gérer because he didn’t know or remember the English words “to steward.” Don’t be scared of a glossary—but also remember sometimes the context translates. The Chalet School books by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer do this amazingly: I remember that I deduced what German and Italian words meant by the way they were used and discussed.
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4) Englishify

Yeah, that’s not a word. But would bilingual characters know? When you grew up speaking a language, you know intuitively what sounds weird, what works, what just isn’t a thing. People who learn a second language don’t have this sense and have to develop it. Honestly, I struggle a lot with suffixes like -ify and -ness and prefixes like un- and dis-. My anglophone grandmother, who’s studying French, will often ask me why something is said a certain way, or why it isn’t said this other way, and I have to answer “it just doesn’t sound right” or “I can’t explain it; I just feel it.” (I didn’t study copyediting in French, for the record.)

So let your characters experiment with English and say things are “worser” than they thought. They can even graft their own words onto English prefixes and suffixes: my siblings and I routinely say things like “gérer-ing” and my little brother combines the French restants and the English “leftovers” into “restovers.” Or we take words like trainer, which means “to lie about untidily,” and just say it in English as “training”—we’ll tell each other, “Your stuff is training on the floor.” We’ve said things are unttached as the opposite of attached; that something happened “in plus” because of the French phrase “en plus” (sort of “on top of that”); and that we’re going to unshovel the driveway, because in French, on déneige, we de-snow. See the complex grammar there? You’ve got lots of potential for funny mistakes in bilingual characters, as well as mispronunciations, not to mention misspellings! Also, don’t forget that a character might hear English and not understand it, leading to all sorts of amusing—or dire—complications. 

In a Nutshell

Basically, language is one of the best ways to flesh out characters. Don’t be scared to dive in. Ask for help from people who speak the language you’re working with (the more of a native speaker they are, the better!). Also, keep in mind different places have different types of the same language: America and Britain, for example, don’t talk the same way, not to mention there’s also regional dialects within the U.S. and the U.K. themselves.

Even if you’re writing an invented language or a dead language, asking for input from bilingual people about your bilingual characters can be helpful. And because this is one of my pet peeves: remember that when translating things from one language to another, it’s never done in the blink of an eye, and it won’t rhyme in the second language just because it did in the first one. ;P

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Katja H. Labonté is a Christian, an extreme bibliophile who devours over 365 books in a year, and an exuberant writer with a talent for starting short stories that explode into book series. She is a bilingual French-Canadian and has about a dozen topics she’s excessively passionate about (hint: that’s why she writes). Katja writes both contemporary and historical fiction, as well as non-magical historical and contemporary kingdom fiction, and covers themes of worth, love, peace, and Christian growth. She spends her days enjoying little things, growing in faith, learning life, and loving people. You can follow her life journey, find free books, browse her services, and more on her website and blog.
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