"Today's fiction is increasingly populated by multilingual urban societies in all their rich cultural variety," contends Bernard Botes Krüger, making a persuasive case that "readers need to 'hear' authentic sounding dialogue from the mouths of foreign-language characters-something which mere translations into standard English can never adequately accomplish." The concept of foreign-language dialogue in fiction is not new; many accomplished authors of the past have used a variety of subtle techniques to help their readers understand instances of 'foreign' dialogue. However, those techinues have never been thoroughly isolated and examined-until now. Using Britain's 'Colonial Era' literature as a starting point in this work, the author discusses and systematically catagorizes every type of 'device' used in the past, assembling in the process a veritible toolbox of techniques which aspiring writers can implement to enrich their multilingual dialogue.

Dickens and the Children of Empire examines the themes of childhood and empire throughout Dickens' oeuvre. The prestigious group of contributors initiate and extend debates on the subjects of post-colonialism, literature of the child and present childhood as an apt metaphor for the colonized subject in Dickens' work.