: Re: How do I handle English speaking where the language used isn't English but is translated in it? I'm kind of having trouble with portraying one of my main character's English speaking foreign

@Murray831

Vote Up Vote Down

One technique for this I remember from James Clavell’s book Shogun is for characters speaking in non-English languages would use words, grammar and sentence structures of that language, in as far as it was possible to be understood by and English reader.

For instance, two of the characters - a English man and a Japanese woman - would speak in Latin to each other, because he didn’t speak Japanese and she didn’t speak English. When they spoke Latin, it read like this:

“Be thou of Zen. Remember, in tranquillity, that the Absolute, the
Tao, is within thee, that no priest or cult or dogma or book or saying
or teaching or teacher stands between Thou and It. Know that Good and
Evil are irrelevant, I and Thou irrelevant, Inside and Outside
irrelevant as are Life and Death.

Besides the use of “thee” and “thou” the style of speech was formal, which was shown through the use of different grammar to when they spoke in English or Japanese.
Shogun also used the (now cliched) dropping in of Japanese words (like -chan and -san honorifics) when Japanese characters spoke Japanese.

Other markers you could use are the use of non-English punctuation, like the << … >> quote marks, to show foreign dialogue; or run that text in italics.

(0)

Login to post a comment!