My teacher's a panda
Just the other day I was playing around with the idea of a human visitor landing on an alien planet and interacting with the citizens there. Of course, they couldn't speak the same language, but instead of trying to create an alien language, or use subtitles, etc, I thought it would be fun to have both creatures speak English, as far as the readers are concerned, yet completely unable to understand each other. I try to imply that they're speaking different languages through their dialogue. So the scene basically goes like this.
"Hello, who are you guys?"
"What are you trying to say?"
"I have no idea what that means."
Eventually, the human begins to learn their language.
"Can you say table?"
"What are you trying to get me to do?"
"Table"
"That's a table."
"Table"
"Table?"
"You've got it!"
I've also decided not to reveal any of the alien words to the readers, only imply that there are alien words, but replacing them with the closest English word we've got.
"What do you like to eat on your home planet?"
"I used to love to eat chicken."
"I don't think we have anything like that here. But you might like this. It's called chicken."
"Chicken? That's a funny word."
Fuzzy Orange Doomsayer
^ That's . . . actually kind of clever. You might want to italicize use of the alien language, though.
That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful
My teacher's a panda
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
The idea was actually for a television series, so it doesn't really matter. But if I were to do it for a novel or short story, I would consider italicizing, although I don't want to make things too easy for the readers.
What about subtitles or something of that sort?
Since I'm hell bent on averting Aliens Speaking English and Translator Microbes when it comes to a sci-fi story I'm working on but still want the aliens to be understandable, I'm left with Translation Convention. However, I'm not entirely sure how to handle someone switching between languages, beyond pointing it out all the time. I'm also wondering weather or not to include a few 'untranslated' words and phrases mixed in with the apparent 'English' which refer to things that there isn't really an English word for.