I kinda ran into this problem when writing the first chapter of my novel. The POV is (at least) a bilingual exile from a city-state A, working for his compatriot in a city-state B. The default language is the region's lingua franca, and it's a point of characterization for him to speak with his employer in his mother tongue of city-state A despite the fact that both of them are fluent in common language. Thing is, my setting is a constructed world, and none of those languages (or any language in my setting, for that matter) is from the RL, so option 3 is kinda off limits for me. I use the "he spoke in language A" only at the start of the dialogue between the POV and his employer, and don't use that dialogue tag throughout the whole scene, just showing that the speakers understand each other. Then I indicate that the language is being switched, if needed (either the POV starts talking to a native or for some other reason). It worked well so far, since the dialogue is mostly in one language, but if there are three speakers present and one of them doesn't speak the language A this is going to be problematic.
edited 29th Jan '18 7:07:19 AM by Millership
Spiral out, keep going.
Personally I use a combination of italics, "X said in [language]," and short phrases in the actual language.
I actually hate when people use too much of a foreign language in their writing for two reasons:
-It takes me out of the story and I start floundering around, trying to parse out what they said from context. I vastly prefer "speaking in X language" tags or some sort of font difference, because I'm not trying my chances with Google Translate.
-It can either sound snobbish because "HAR HAR, LOOK AT HOW SMART AND MULTILINGUAL I AM," or conversely it can sound immature because "HEY GUYS, I WATCH ANIME AND I KNOW SOOOOOOO MUCH JAPANESE NOW!!!!!111@@"
On the other hand, I'm intentionally using a LOT of different languages in my superhero script Takotsubo, because 1) my cast is all POC and Bilingual Dialogue is very common, and 2) it's a characterization point that only a few of the Asian-American characters speak their family languages properly, so they feel inadequate because of that. The Tagalog characters understand even less when the Tagalog GODS speak in the medieval, non-Hispanicised Tagalog language from five hundred years ago.
It's a huge emotional point when the Tagalog sea-god makes a long and upset speech to the Filipino female lead that he loves her, but half of it's in Tagalog and she can't react properly to "Mahal kita" at the end since she's still panicking and trying to piece everything together.
edited 17th Feb '18 3:04:41 PM by Sharysa
Option #1 is the best if you're trying to actually tell your audience what's going on.
Option #3 is literally the worst thing you could choose. For example, I recently read a book where the author knows eight languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Latin, Hebrew, etc.) and there are six languages used in the book, like option #3 in OP. Except unlike option #3 it was actually option #4: original language without translations. Either option totally takes readers out of the story if they don't speak the language, and the more languages used the fewer audience members there are who will understand the book cover-to-cover without help. It might be a cool Bilingual Bonus but anything that distracts your readers is something you want to avoid, generally.
Option #2 might be the best overall because then you don't have to say "in Spanish" every time. This is also the only way you could do it outside of prose or verse, like in a graphic novel. You could look at how El Goonish Shive does it for a comic example and Vikings for an example from TV (which I would say is the aural equivalent). It's ungrammatical, though, to use greater-than and less-than symbols, so I'd suggest using a different quotation mark system (like the ">>" and "<<" symbols used in French and other languages).
Option #1 is possibly the weakest, though second best overall of the three.
I would also like to note that option #3 is explicitly tell don't show. You are "showing" the audience a language they don't understand and then you are telling them what it means. Moreover, it just inflates word count and a publisher would probably ask for you to translate it or to use one language or the other. After all, if you're going to tell the audience the English translation anyway and it wastes page space, then why not just use the English translation? A bigger word count means more pages means more paper means higher production cost for the printer means a higher expense for the publisher.
Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty