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Re: writing non english dialouge

[(Anonymous)]

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...)

Re: writing non english dialouge

[(Anonymous)]

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.

Re: writing non english dialouge

[(Anonymous)]

(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.

Re: writing non english dialouge

[(Anonymous)]

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?

Re: writing non english dialouge

[(Anonymous)]

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!"

"...?????"

Re: writing non english dialouge

[(Anonymous)]

Что ты говорешь?

What?

Не понимаю.


(Sorry I had to)

Re: writing non english dialouge

[(Anonymous)]

hahahahaha

Re: writing non english dialouge

[(Anonymous)]

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.