Sidenote But As Someone Raised Bilingual The Passage Where He Says 'my Daughter' SO Strongly Reads To Me As A Translated Text - Tumblr Posts

MB's filtering in TMBD

I think reading the books as translated texts makes every sense - we get lots of moments that only make sense in that context, in fact - not least of which is "the company" which obviously has a name but just as obviously is being filtered out by our narrator. It gels too with the way MB talks about the multilingual CR, where translation systems are so ubiquitous that the slight delay between the gray Targets speaking and the translation coming in is worth noting as unusual/jarring. (NE) The hints we get that people are speaking other languages or through assistive tech, but being readily understood without commentary seem to strongly suggest that there's a pretty wide range of languages in such spaces that are considered default options. That also makes it especially funny when MB translates idioms. (Best (all?) examples are from FT)