I found a list helpful for writers wanting to avoid the dreaded Mary Sue/Marty Stu character.  If a protagonist had three or more of the traits that character had failed the test. One item that caught my attention was “Speaks five or more languages fluently.” There are a few rare individuals that can do this. They’re just not incredibly attractive and able to run the mile in under four minutes. I want to make reading stories which involve other languages easy for the readers to comprehend, but if it is too easy, the illusion is broken.

Creating a character whose strength is foreign languages does present some challenges. In one of my earliest novels, I followed a twenty-something Texan adult traveling around Paris who speaks French with a few intentional errors. However, this Texan’s language ability was not superb but enough to impress some Parisians. He receives more positive attention than his strikingly handsome and strictly monolingual friend. As my character was not completely fluent in French, I had him think about what he was going to say in English before he spoke in French. Then, he translated the other person’s response in his head. This prevented the need for inserting translation notes during conversations.

What if inability to comprehend the other person’s language is the core problems in a story? For example, characters in an historical fiction novel concerning the Island city of Tenochtitlan. As ancient Aztec nobles they speak Nahuatl (but and I do not). That should not present a challenge if I do my research. Classical Nahuatl translators exist online. However, my readers will not want to resort to that. To give a richer sense of the nature of this Mesoamerican society. I use authentic names for people and places and insert a few common Nahuatl terms such as avocado, chayote, chipotle, and chocolatle.

The difficulty occurs both for the inhabitants of this city (and for me as a writer) when the Spanish conquistadors march over the horizon. In scenes where characters from both groups appear, each group will be confused as to what the other one is saying. There should be a translator, a native who has been with the Spanish explorers long enough to pick up some of their language. But, this translator will not be fluent in Spanish, and their dialog will change depending on who he (or she) is speaking to.

The translator may use a stilted speech towards the Aztec nobility and casual speech to a peer. When speaking Spanish to the soldiers, it might be at the level of a five-year-old. However, when I researched the communication between Cortés and the Aztec nobility, I discovered this required two different translators. Aguilar, who spoke Spanish and Mayan, did not know the Nahuatl language. An enslaved bilingual Nahua woman named la Malinche translated his Mayan into Nahuatl the speech of the Aztec nobility. She has become famous (or infamous) in her own way as a woman who help bring down the empire who had originally enslaved her.

In each instance you want to give the reader an authentic feeling of how this point of view character senses the dialogue. If the reader only comprehends as much as they do, this avoids breaking the illusion of the difficulty in communicating. This takes skill and some effort to write in this manner so that the book can be written almost completely in one language. It is important to adequately portray the superpower of knowing multiple languages.

_{Illustration of Hernán Cortés and La Malinche, 1576 Durán Codex}