Books.

You're reading a book and the main character walks into a café in a quieter neighborhood of Paris. She is extremely nostalgic - she's 30 years old and coming back to the same café that she met her recently deceased husband in back when she took a semester abroad in college.

The author says something like this:

"The air hung heavy, yet light with the memories and the conversations of years and lives and loves gone by. [The main character] thought to herself, "This is uncanny - it's like time hasn't passed a single day since the day [her dead husband] and I met here ten years ago." She was right. The quaint café held the same [italicized random French phrase that means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING unless you speak French] she had remembered so vividly." (Johnson 89)

Why do authors writing in ENGLISH feel the need to use FOREIGN phrases in a DIFFERENT LANGUAGE THAN THE READERS' when trying to establish how culturally cultural their story is? If I'm reading the book in English - and the book is written in English - then why are there totally unexplained/undefined/untranslated phrases in another language in it?

Completely counterproductive.