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LITERARY CODE-SWITCHING AND BEYOND Travel writing may potentially include multiple code-switching types. Overt ZCS seems to be mainly used as a compromise. On the one hand, it satisfies the presumed monolingual reader’s needs; on the other hand, it allows the writer to give a taste of a foreign tongue that the work of travel literature is most probably imbued with. Examples: 1. Twain and his companion Harris are travelling by train to Heilbronn. The train is crowded, and they try to interact in German with fellow travellers. Despite the fact that the character’s attempt is unsuccessful — he is not understood, and they end up speaking in English, a language already widespread in Germany at that time — the fact that the protagonist tries to speak in German is reported in the narrative. There were some nice German people in our compartment. (...) After a while some of those folks got out and a German gentleman and his two young daughters got in. I spoke in German: to one of the latter several times, but without result (Mark Twain: A Tramp Abroad, 23). 2. Twain and Harris would like to rent a boat in order to go rafting along the river Neckar, in the proximity of Hirschhorn. However, by employing High German, they struggle to talk to the raftman renting boats. An unknown man, called Mr. X, makes himself understood by using broken German — more precisely a German interspersed with English words. This hybrid language is reflected by Twain in the narrative. X. always spoke English, to Germans, but his plan was to turn the sentence wrong end first and upside down, according to German construction, and sprinkle in a German word without any essential meaning to it, here and there, by way of flavor. Yet he always made himself understood. He could make those dialect-speaking raftsmen understand him, sometimes, when even young Z. had failed with them; and young Z. was a pretty good German scholar. For one thing, X. always spoke with such confidence, — perhaps that helped (Mark Twain: A Tramp Abroad, 164). SUMMARY Depending on whether the multilinguality of the fictional situation is reported either through direct or indirect linguistic mapping, with reflections on the specificity of the multilingual situation, or with narratorial translation, these techniques can be categorized as overt, reflected or covert « 40 c
