daredevilkink | Discussion/Off-Topic Post #1

When you're reading an english fanfiction and theres a character who speaks a language other than english & they have a log of dialogue or are a major character how do you prefer their non-english dialogue to be represented?

Do you prefer the dialogue to be written in the actual language that they are speaking (with subtitles provided at the writers discretion)?
Or do you prefer the dialogue to be written in english with some form of punctuation used to indicate that they are not speaking english?

thank you!

I do not speak for others, but I would prefer the dialogue be represented in English, especially if it is a conversation that goes on for any significant amount of time. It would just make things faster to read and I, personally, would just skip to the translation anyway. It just makes things faster.

On AO3, I've seen people write the dialogue in the non-English language, but then if you hover over it with your mouse a translation pops up.

Otherwise, I just skip over it yeah. I don't eve. Bother reading the translation, because by that point I've forgotten the context.

Unless I'm working in 1st person or 3rd person limited and the POV character doesn't speak the language (and thus it isn't necessary to understand the story), I do hover-over translation.

I feel that anything else takes a reader too far out of the story.

Definitely in English with some 'said in XY' tagged on.
That's honestly my preferred method for non-English speech of any length anything else has not much of a point except showing off the author's language skills (or worse google-translate skills...)

Oh god, especially when it's done using the alphabet of that language.

Like, I keep seeing Russian being written in Cyrillic in fanfic, and my mind literally fills those words in as "blank blank" when I see them. The author could have inserted a picture of a scribble and had the same effect.

(Incidentally if you know the foreign alphabet you will most likely cringe because 'this is not how you transliterate')

But honestly? I'm also skimming over e.g. Spanish. I don't know any and have no intention of scraping at my basic level French knowledge in the hope that I might be able to extrapolate a few words...
And yeah as an anon above said: by the time I reached the end I might have forgotten the context anyway so it's not much use to me if the translations are provided then.

Exactly.

Like, okay. Fisk can speak Mandarin, right? So a fic writer could do this in 3 ways:

-----

1) "谢谢," Fisk says.

2) "Xiè xie," Fisk says.

3) "Thank you," Fisk says in Mandarin.

Which one flows better for your general audience?

Conversely, the first (or second) method works well if you want your audience and POV character to be in the dark about what the other character is saying:

"이거 얼마예요?"

".... huh?"

"얼마예요!"

"...?????"

Что ты говорешь?

What?

Не понимаю.

(Sorry I had to)

hahahahaha

Yaaaassss, THIS.

Because the difference between "Nyet" and "Нет" is that I can figure out how the first one is supposed to be pronounced without needing to do research on how the Russian letters are pronounced. Even if translation is provided, I can't "hear" the dialogue when it's written like that.

(I'm a non-english-speaking person so, .. I don't know if this fact biases me someway but still I felt I had to say it ò_ò)

as a reader, personally I find it interesting to see other languages representation in a story. I might just glance at the non-english-sentence and head over to the translation but never skip everything as a whole, because if it's in the story then there must be a reason why it's there.

however, writing in another language is difficult if you're not pretty fluent or have someone who's gonna check it for you so, I'd rather say that's better to write everything in english, instead of random nonsense in non-english. Or use other tricks/expedients/whatever to give the idea that those characters are speaking in their own language.

[...] prefer the dialogue to be written in english with some form of punctuation used to indicate that they are not speaking english?
how can you use punctuation to show that they're not talking in english..?

Not OP but I've seen fics where either bolding/italics or different types of quotation marks or a combination of both were used to convey that currently language X is spoken

aaah like that! it makes sense
(I was thinking about full stops, commas etc =_=)

in regards to the punctuation question, in comic books use < and > at the beginning and end of the sentence to indicate a non english language (eg; "< and here he is >" )

you're right! totally forgot that

I'm also a non-English speaker, and my personal opinion is that foreign languages in fic are usually only fun when the reader can speak both languages -- at least when it's something that isn't immediately translated.

I have actually done this in the past, but I've always tried to make sure that it isn't too much text, and that it's either translated right away or that the same or another character explains what is being said. You know, like this (this was for a show called ReGenesis):

It didn’t take long until he heard a familiar voice at the other end, and he greeted her with, ”Hej Lotta. Jag var plötsligt tvungen att åka till Kanada, därför ville jag... Ja, ja, jag mår bra... Mh-hm.”

He looked up at a noise from the doorway and saw his daughter, bleary-eyed and sluggish, scuffling closer, stopping in the doorframe.

He continued his phone conversation, “Ja. ... Jag kommer stanna här ett tag, därför vet jag inte... Javisst... Ja, det vore toppen. ... Ja, jag kommer tillbaka, men jag vet inte när. ... Tack, hejdå.”

He hung up the call and Lilith looked at him questioningly. “You sleep here after all?”

“Yeah,” he just said.

“What was that all about?”

”Just some business with the house I had to take care of.”

”You in trouble for bailing, or something?”

”No. I just called to let them know I’m gonna be away for a while.”

-------------

That said, I personally don't like reading fics where a lot of foreign language I don't understand is being used. Even if the translated text is given right with it, it disrupts the flow and pulls me out of the moment.

It's even worse when the translation isn't given right away but maybe only at the end of the chapter, because then you have to re-read everything and switch back and forth. Sometimes those fics feel almost like showing off, as in, "Check it out, I can speak more than one language!"

This. I mean I have seen a few instances (more in published books than fanfic) where people said something and then either the narration or the dialogue afterwards made clear what had been said but that's really not that easy to pull off. (I once read a book which had a weird half/half thing. It had a glossary at the end that translated some words and some were made clear from what came afterwards. Only there was no indication what was what so sometimes a word came up, I checked the glossary, cursed because I didn't find it, read on and discovered that a paragraph later the context made clear what had been said).

Plus as you said there is rarely a point to it. The book I just mentioned admittedly had one (a crime novel set in the 19th century and the small-time criminals were sometimes talking in Flash (a special 'thief-speech' of the time) and while I wasn't a fan of the way it was integrated it did add to the atmosphere. But just having two random characters talk in Spanish/Russian/whatever because the author knows the language doesn't add that much to the atmosphere.

Yeah. I read one recently where Claire and Santino were talking to each other in Spanish, which... okay, it was cool to see them do it in the show, but I completely skipped over that portion of the person's fic (which was a shame, because it was like half of the fic).

(this was me haha. I just talked about it a little move above.)

I've written a fic that was about half Spanish but really the point of it for me was to sement a friendship between me and my native Spanish speaking friend. I think it's a really cool sort of bonus. Also, my sister had a lot of fun reading it (and she hates fanfic) just because she sort of has a grasp on the language.

So even though I know it is a very not popular fic for being so Spanish I don't really care. I do feel bad for the person I wrote the fic as a fill for though. haha. but you know, getting filled doesn't ganrantee quality.

this whole topic made me think that maybe, as simple method as it may sound, if a writer really wants to put non-english text for whatever reason, they could do the inverse:
write it directly in english, but using the notes, the hover-over option, etc to have the portion of text in the other-languange displayed for anyone who's interested.

Discussion/Off-Topic Post #1

writing non english dialouge

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Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge

Re: writing non english dialouge