Using foreign languages

I want to have a character speak a foreign language. However, I also want to allow the audience to read it while simultaneously conveying some of the "foreign-ness" characters who don't know the language would experience. So far, I have three ideas for this, but I'm not sure which would work the best, and I'm also open to other suggestions.

1: Straight-up translate it and say the character is speaking a foreign language.

• "I know that," he said in Spanish, "but why didn't you tell me?"
• Pros: Simplest to implement and write
• Cons: Doesn't convey the different language in any way but a word

2: Put the translation in something besides quotation marks.

• <I know that,> he said in Spanish, <but why didn't you tell me?>
• Pros: Visually shows difference in speaking
• Cons: Can distract from the actual text

3: Write the original language normally and put the translation afterwards in some way.

• "Lo sé," he said, "pero ¿por qué no me dices?" I know that, but why didn't you tell me?
• Pros: Has the actual language
• Cons: Long translations can get unwieldy or require breaking up the quotation, which is distracting

Does anyone have any suggestions, be it with these or something different?

Well, #2 is the worst.

1 seems to me like a bit telling-not-showing; it's easy to simply skip over. 2 could be decent, but you'd want to pick some different punctuation mark (perhaps the French angle-quotes?) I personally like 3 the best, but it is rather unwieldy.

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

How do you do French angle quotes? And are they different enough from regular quotation marks to be apparent? Using the < and > symbols was, in hindsight, a pretty stupid idea.

I've left markers in the form of parenthesis and bold text to signify non-English (or non-English convention) in my stuff though I personally am not satisfied with that method. I use it to convey the characters speaking in Japanese and personally I'd wonder what would be the better method myself. Learn enough Japanese to do the lines and leave them in romaji form and provide a translation possibly elsewhere (footnotes on each page?), or keep as is or simply not provide a translation at all.

One day I'll find the answer to that while in revisions after I finish the damn book this year.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

I like to put things said in non-English in all italics and also note what language they're speaking periodically.

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

That's a possibility, but I tend to use italics for emphasis. I could use bold for either, but for some reason that doesn't feel right to me.

To establish the otherworldliness of some fairies, I never outright stated their dialogue.

Instead of

I'd have

But if you have entire paragraphs of this, it could get bulky and hard to do.

edited 23rd Jan '12 7:09:41 PM by CrystalGlacia

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."

Yup - making the English grammar reflect the language's more is a very good way of doing it. If you think it too subtle, there is always adding the italic on top or even a different font. Depending on how you're going to be published, of course.

I've tried for Germanic before now, and even reverted to thee and thine to reflect du und dein with verb endings - as well as strict Time, Manner, Place for sentence construction. The varied clausal usages were killers.

But, that might be a bit extreme for your needs. English: don't you just love the fact you can go ultra Latin or German for grammar?

Urgh - just had a thought: use of an extreme dialect. How good is your Jamaican/ South African English/ Australian English/ Scots/ Yorkshire/ whatever? These can substitute, at a pinch.

edited 23rd Jan '12 8:39:42 PM by Euodiachloris

When I have a character speaking in a foreign language (and thus, in all italics), I have emphasis denoted by bold and italicized text.

It's most amusing where I get a scene that involves characters speaking in both English and non-English. It's most headache-inducing when I have characters speaking in more than one non-English language...

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

I do the angle characters as « and », unicode 0x00AB and 0x00BB respectively. (I am much happier about unicode since I learned the cute trick to enter it via the keyboard on Linux.)

Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

Or, on Windows, you can use Alt + 174 («) and Alt + 175 (»). A bit unwieldy, but it works.

Google is wonderful.

edited 23rd Jan '12 9:30:26 PM by TeraChimera

An obvious-but-often-ignored caveat: If you're going to use #3, make sure you either actually know the language yourself or know someone who can provide a reliable translation of what you say. Otherwise, #1 is your best option.

Oh, definitely. That's why I used Spanish for my examples: aside from English, Spanish is the language I know best.

What's the fluency of the narrator, or the character the POV is closest to?

#1 is best for conveying fluency, and is most useful if you want it to be unintrusive. And though it looks like you don't, it's possible to start with other approaches and lead into #1 if the foreign language is popping up a lot. A variant of #2, including guillemets, or I suppose italics (though italics are more standard for untranslated foreign text), would probably imply something close to fluency, but with more of a hint that it's not something the listener is comfortable with. If it's not established and used early, it could jerk the reader out of the story because you're establishing a new convention, but the reader can probably get used to it. Crystal Glacia's could imply the character's understanding the general gist of things. There are a bunch of things you could play with to show a semi-fluent understanding of what's being said, but those will naturally generally come with somewhat obscuring the meaning of the character's words.

I don't particularly like #3 because it's long and unwieldy, especially if you're using it more than once or twice or for long quotes. It could have its place, I guess, if the narrator's taking some time to figure out what the person is saying, and if that is the case then showing it happen the first couple of times before phasing it out for something closer to #1 would be better. If the listener doesn't understand the language at all, you could leave it untranslated *

, but then the reader shouldn't lose anything significant for not knowing what it says. But if none of the language is being understood, the listener is most likely not actually getting what is being said and could only get something like, "He murmured something in Spanish, his tone half-exasperated." (yes okay so never that exact example)

Other than showing fluency, or generally conveying other things about the speech (like Crystal Glacia's otherworldliness), I wouldn't say show-don't-tell applies.

... though it seems you're trying to make an impression on the reader that's a combination of the interpretations of many characters, instead of a single POV character? Is there a particular reason for wanting this impression?

edited 24th Jan '12 11:16:43 PM by greedling

You will not go to space today.

Actually, I never really thought about what these would imply about the POV character. I wanted to show the reader that yes, this is a foreign language. While it's easy to do in a movie by just using subtitles, it's much harder in a book.

However, you make some good points. I'm thinking I'll shift away from 3 unless the POV character doesn't understand the language, in which case I also won't provide a translation. Even though you say show-don't-tell doesn't apply, and I can see why, I probably also won't use 1 because 2 provides some visual shorthand to tell the reader that a different language is being spoken. It could be used when one character is translating for two others, and I want the reader to understand the whole thing without it all looking like the same language. For example:

Here, it's easy to see that there are two different languages.

3 is show dont tell. Otherwise, what do you want to achieve with your languages?

Disc World Feet of Clay featured Golems and a wierd typeface was used, it was English, but the letters were designed to look Hebrewish. Making Money, golems spoke Enochian, it was English, but in a foreign alphabet that only initiates of the Golden Dawn understand.

Star Gate Atlantis the sidekick swears in Belarussian, the Audience dont know the words, but it is obvious that he is swearing. Another time, he was ordered to only say Hi to the folks back home and not give confidential information. He talked to the camera, the Audience could see by the glint in his eye that he was telling information.

edited 25th Jan '12 3:22:04 PM by Glyndwr

My inclination would be option 3a: using the foreign language — sparingly! — and not glossing it straight out but making it obvious from context or having another character translate or something.

But I'm a language nerd and that's somewhat my thing anyway.

The child is father to the man —Oedipus

I must say, I've never seen option 2 in published fiction. And an Interface Screw like the one Terry Pratchett uses (giving foreign language speakers a different font) only really works in fourth wall-breaking comedy.

Option 3 sometimes annoys me, if there is a lot of foreign language dialogue and consequently a lot of translations/footnotes. Still, I've seen it used to great effect, for example in Tango Noir. I'd go with that if you're only going to have a small amount of foreign dialogue.

Option 1 is the one I'd be most likely to use, at least if you're going to have a lot of foreign dialogue. It doesn't draw attention to itself like 2, nor does it run the risk of taking up space and testing the reader's patience like 3.

edited 27th Jan '12 4:26:47 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

It does not matter who I am. What matters is, who will you become? - motto of Omsk Bird

I have but it's very rare. (Most of it is in other languages like Spanish to boot!)

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

What Terry Pratchett uses is less Interface Screw and more Painting the Fourth Wall. House Of Leaves is an Interface Screw in text form.

Besides, I kind of want it to draw attention to itself. If you hear a language in a crowd that isn't your first language, even if you know it already, your mind kind of snaps onto it and listens, zoning everything else out, whether or not you can understand it. It stands out because it's foreign, and I want to keep that foreignness in, at least a little.

edited 27th Jan '12 8:23:01 AM by TeraChimera

Saw this now.

I've seen option 1 being used in novels like the ones in some Tom Clancy books.

"Exit muna si Polgas. Ang kailangan dito ay si Dobermaxx!"

I once read a novel in which the author used different fonts for different languages (about 3 or 4 of them) to enable English-speakers the ability to understand what was said an in what language (at the beginning of the book, he actually noted what fonts were being used to denote which language.

It was a serious work and I didn't find it distract from the story - I took it as an advanced form of Translation Convention in which not only do you get to understand it but you get an idea that people are talking back and forth in different languages as if you were hearing the differences yourself.

It cut down on a lot of '... he said in Flemish' type constructs. IIRC, he put markers earlier on to remind you which font pertained to what, like "they approached, speaking softly in Flemish" and then provided the translated dialogue n the appropriate font.

In my work I've got a character who speaks only German and French and another character who speaks English and fairly basic French and German so their dialogue is a mix of French and German - based on what words in each language the English-speaker knows/understands. I've kept the actual French and German down to basic minimums and just explained that the conversation is a mix of both languages with many pauses to explain words or switch language to find common understanding on the part of the German/French speaker and a mix of whatever French/German words the English-speaker remembers at the time.

A couple of my characters are New Zealanders (what a surprise!) so they intersperse occasional Māori words with their English but they're talking with people from the UK so they have to provide translations in-story: "I'm starved, let's get some kai" "What sort of food is 'kye'?" "Any food!" or I convey what the listeners understand when they hear it: "James knew from earlier conversations that a 'hui' was a meeting and got the gist of what Kris was saying..."

Not much to add, except that I often find option 3 annoying - not because there's anything inherently wrong with it, but because it's so, so often done badly. If you use it, even for short sentences, make sure you get hold of a native speaker of the language and dialect of the character. There's nothing more immersion-breaking than a supposedly Castillian character suddenly using the grammar or swears of Mexican Spanish.

The same applies to English as well - an otherwise excellent series of books I read was marred by the supposedly "British" characters of the Victorian era using phrases like hitting someone upside the head - a term I've only ever heard from speakers of US English.

New Zealand English is far closer to UK English than US English is, and even we have idiomatic phrases that differ from that of the UK (including a few "Americanisms" that we've adopted in addition to our own peculiarities of speech) but US English is practically as foreign to UK, NZ and Australian English as Mexican Spanish is to Castilian.

There has been some Eagleland Osmosis over the years with regard to language, especially due to the large number of US-based shows shown in the rest of the English-speaking world, and you'll occasionally find people using "ass" rather than "arse" (especially younger people who have consumed more US television and movies than older people) but for the most part, US idiom is not used outside the US and portrayals of supposedly "British" people who "kick ass" by hitting people "upside the head" for taking their "cell phone" is every bit as glaring and immersion-breaking as having a Basque speak Parisian French would be to those familiar with those dialects.

Remember people: for a lot of us, "American" is a foreign language.

And if Gail Carriger happens to be lurking, a more appropriate turn of phrase would be to "box" (or "belt" or "clip") someone "around the ear[hole]".

edited 28th Jan '18 10:14:39 AM by Wolf1066