Peeking Over the Language Barrier

Guest Post by T. Newyear Yeager –

Write what you know, we all hear. As writers of historical fiction, however, we are constantly writing what we can’t possibly know fully, the lived experience of the past. Still, we may feel inclined to stick to the familiar, to the places, people, and eras we’ve encountered during our education or previous research. It’s also natural for English-language writers to draw primarily on English-language sources and histories.

Sources in other languages may feel inaccessible. This barrier can seem particularly challenging when it involves a different alphabet or writing system. Even a simple search can feel daunting.

By combining scholarly resources, online AI tools, and recently digitized collections that once were hard to access, we can find intriguing sources–even if they aren’t in a language we speak (or speak very well). As a historian of Siberia and Mongolia, I want to show you a few fun tricks to try if you’re curious about the online treasures that lie just outside our historical comfort zones. I’m drawing on my experience with Eastern European and Central Asian sources, but some of these tips may apply elsewhere, too.

Get Oriented

Starting general–and looking beyond popular secondary sources–will prepare you to go deeper into new territory. Academic publications hold the key to people and places outside of well-worn elites and capitals (I’m looking at you, Romanovs). Many local universities lend to non-students, and it’s worth asking about their borrowing policies.

Try to find a range of historians, including some from the culture or time you’re interested in. There can be a striking difference in historiography that can provide more fuel for the creative fire. For more flavor and story sparks, make sure to read the footnotes or endnotes. Academic historians often tuck beloved anecdotes there that don’t quite fit elsewhere.

JSTOR is the real article

General histories may not get down to the nitty gritty level we need for good historical fiction. One workaround: scholarly articles, which tend to be more focused and rich in these details. Sites like JSTOR let anyone read a set number of articles online and save these articles in folders for future use, all for free.

Don’t fear the

You’ve gotten your bearings and are ready to dive deeper. It’s time to start peering over the language barrier. If you find people in the past who intrigue you, search for them in the original alphabet. A page full of Cyrillic can be intimidating, but trust me, it’s worth it! 

For example, if I’m looking for more on Nikolai Bestuzhev, the 19th-century Decembrist rebel, I can pull up his Wikipedia entry in English and copy his name in Cyrillic:

Then, even if I have no idea what those letters mean, I can pop that name into Google Books or my favorite search engine and see what I find.

Another way to search: Consider transliteration and how your new historical friend’s name might be spelled according to different systems. There may be more than one possibility. For example,

can be transliterated as Nikolai or Nikolay. Try both!

Overseas libraries and archives are your friends

Archival materials in other countries used to be extremely hard to access, particularly when political tensions prevailed. Things have changed, however: Libraries, archives, and history buffs around the world have been digitizing and transcribing interesting letters, essays, poems, and other texts for anyone to access online. The websites that catalog them can be translated automatically by many browsers to help you conduct a basic search.

Machine translate it

Once you’ve found something promising, automatic translation can help you decipher it. We’re fortunate to have decent AI translation models at our fingertips that can handle the world’s more widely spoken languages. It won’t be the most poetic or snappy rendering–you still need a human for that–but it will help you get the feel for your time/place/person.

Get a guide

As you explore a new place or time in a new language, there are things you know you don’t know and things you haven’t realized you don’t know. You need guides to sort these out.

Academics may not want to read your full rough draft, but they are often willing and even excited to answer specific questions or direct you to new sources. It’s worth reaching out to a professor or specialist librarian once you know what you don’t know.

Once you have a full draft worth sharing, recruit someone who knows the place and language as an early beta reader to cover the unknown unknowns of cultural nuance. For example, a friend working on a novel series set in mid-century Brazil has asked several Brazilians of different background to give her developmental feedback, flagging moments that just didn’t feel right for them. It’s helped her craft a better story.

So don’t let some unfamiliar letters or a different language keep you from gently exploring what can prove profoundly worthwhile. It’s a process of discovery that can inspire new directions in your writing and that will allow you to share your discoveries with others. And perhaps most rewarding of all, it can lead to greater understanding of our wonderfully varied world.