: Re: Show the translation of foreign language thoughts in a manuscript? Background Part of an English story takes place in rural South America, where Spanish is the native tongue. Problem A Spanish

@Debbie451

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Both your second and fourth examples look natural to me. Including the upside-down question mark might be slightly preferable, but sometimes adding a little-used character can add to the expense and trouble of printing a book.

That said, styles for punctuation vary across countries, across different publishers, and even between different editors. If you are submitting your manuscript to a publisher, look at other books published by the same company and copy the punctuation they use.

To be honest, though, I don't see any reason to have the Spanish for "What's going on?" appear in the original language at all when your book is in English. The usual convention is to translate everything into the language in which the story is told, except for a few exclamations1 or greetings that give a flavour of the story's setting, or for dialogue where the fact that the words spoken are actually in another language is important to the plot. "What's going on?" is a straightforward question that could be asked by anyone anywhere in the world. The only reason I would put it in Spanish would be if I wanted to stealthily give the reader a little language lesson because I had a turn of plot later on for which the reader needs to know those particular Spanish words. Even then, I'd probably just give the words in Spanish and let the reader figure out the meaning from context.

1Which would would give rise to a similar question to yours but regarding exclamation marks, or to exactly the same question as yours given that many exclamations are in the form of questions, so I'm far from saying your question is invalid, just that providing "ordinary" words in both languages seems laboured.

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