|
I think with much older novels, eg Agatha Christie's French, the foreign language was okay because the author actually spoke it. (She never attempted any other language). Authors like E Phillips Oppenheim were themselves fluent in French, and could use it in their books without a problem.
If you've ever read "Trilby", by George Du Maurier (1895) it includes some untranslated French which would cause a modern high school French student consternation. It was the street French of the working class of the 1850s, which du Maurier of course knew. (The author's French name is a clue) and du Maurier was an art student in digs in a poorer quarter of Paris in the 1850s.
I am sure that if I seriously wanted a few sentences in almost any language I could, within my city (Perth Western Australia) find a cultural society of the country, and have a few lines written for me.
For example, I might want to know something as simple as how a Frenchman responds to a phone call from an old and close friend. I am fairly sure it would not just be 'Allo mon ami.'
It is a minefield. Regretfully, I speak no other language, although I can understand very simple German (short declarative sentences, but not those wonderfully complex sentences full of sub-clauses where the verbs all pile up at the end) so I don't get shaken out of a book if something is wrong.
|