: Re: Scenes with different languages spoken after translation So... imagine you have a story in your native language written down, with protagonists that speak this language and no problem at all,

@Ravi5107385

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I would not advise swapping round the languages. Part of the flavour of any story is its setting. If I am reading a book set in Germany or Austria I expect and understand that, for the most part, the characters will be depicted as speaking German, even if it is translated into English for my benefit. I also accept and understand that English will be a foreign language to them. (Quite possibly I picked up that book specifically because I wanted a change from the usual sort of books I read that concern native English speakers in the US or the UK.) As you suggest, it just looks weird if a bunch of characters who have hitherto been stated to be German are suddenly revealed to be native English speakers for whom German is a foreign tongue. My response is likely to be, "Huh? What? Is this a science fiction novel about an alternate timeline, or am I dreaming?"

Nonetheless, sometimes the inversion you describe is done, or sometimes a third language is brought in to be the foreign language. It is common enough that there is a whole TV Tropes page about this phenomenon. However often it is done, I still say flipping around the languages almost always looks stupid and jarring. The only way it ever works is as a joke.

So, my strong recommendation is either to translate all the dialogue into the target language or, preferably, to simply state that Character X said something in English that your viewpoint character did not understand, even if he did catch the tone of what X was saying.

I would like to add a few minor points:

The difficulty you describe would not be likely to arise in the first place with novels published in English because the convention followed by most publishers in the UK or the US is that very little of the dialogue is left in the original language, usually only greetings, exclamations, culturally-specific terms and any speech where the plot depends on the reader knowing the exact words spoken in the original language. I realise that the convention may be different in Germany where a greater percentage of the people are multilingual.
I suggest you look at some previous questions and answers on Writers Stack Exchange that cover questions related to yours. The question most relevant to you was "How to convey that the POV character does not understand what's said in dialogue?"
There have also been questions on the best way to show a foreign language, on how to handle multilingual scenes, on untranslated passages in translated works, and on translating thoughts in a foreign language.
While we're on the subject of translation, in the excerpt in English about Siegfried, replace "speaking" with "saying". The verb "to speak" just isn't one of the verbs we use to immediately precede a direct quote in English. I can offer no logical explanation; it's just one of those quirks that all languages have.

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