Use of Foreign Phrases in Writing

-- This is basically just my opinion, but I don't think I'm unreasonable. Just think about how you would feel if you read a story (or poem) in which the writer used a foreign language you don't understand for important words in sentences or for entire sentences altogether. It's pretty frustrating - and if you find it annoying, chances are, so does the general reader. I use Spanish as an example because of the story that prompted this little essay, and because I know a thing or two about Spanish.

Edit after comments: I don't think a translation should be necessary. It makes reading a chore - especially if it's not within the flow of the story itself - instead of a leisure activity. Sometimes I'll add the translation in italics at the end of a quote, like: «"Me mató," she said. He killed me. »But putting it in an author's note (or, in the case of an actual novel, an introductory chapter) makes the translation inconvenient, and the language generally irritating. There are better, more reader-friendly ways to deal with using foreign language without letting your reader forget your story has non-English-speaking characters in it.

Anyway, on to the essay --

I recently stumbled across a story in which all or most of the dialogue was in Spanish. Which would have been fine, had the story actually been in Spanish. Well, that's not the only thing that was wrong with their use of it. Here's what I think about using a foreign language in fiction writing:

It should be done sparingly. A minor character saying something in Spanish to remind your reader every once in a while that they are, in fact, reading a story that takes place in Spain is a good thing.

It should be easy to understand given context. If your minor character says, "Hola, señor. ¿Querría agua embotellada?" Your main character should say something like, "Ah, no, gracias. I had a bottle of water earlier." (When the foreign language is the character's first language, you should leave it as regular text; when your English-speaking main character says one or two words of Spanish in an English sentence, the Spanish words should be in italics - or so this is the pattern I've noticed.)

If you have no inkling of the grammar of the language you want to use, do not just put your sentences in a translator! Then you'll have readers like me, who are familiar with the language (actually, I'm familiar with several) who can tell you just threw phrases into a translator, and you will alienate them or piss them off. A writer who doesn't ask around or just use simple insertions like Spanglish loses a good bit of credibility for me, personally. So please don't do that.

So don't overdo it. I read The Picture of Dorian Gray in the fall, and I was put off by the amount of French in the novel. Characters would have short exchanges in French, to which I wasn't privy, even though I was reading the book. Readers don't like that. (Granted, it's a classic novel, and I think people back then were more lingually educated than we are today.) Set the stage with a few phrases that won't completely lose your readers who just can't connect the foreign phrase to context. Don't frustrate your monolingual or bilingual-in-something-else readers by making language they don't understand crucial to your plot.

Unless you're writing about the ancient world in which Latin actually was a language, it generally shouldn't be used conversationally. No one does that anymore. Latin is legalese and science tongue, and people who try to speak Latin conversationally these days are strange individuals, probably anti-conformists whose friends think they're incredibly nerdy. (Plus, Latin is complicated. I've tried it, and I've heard the conversations after Latin exams at university. Don't do it to yourself.)