: Re: How to address family members solely by relationship in dialogue? Most English speakers probably just care about You, Mom, Dad, Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, Grandparents, Great-Grandparents and Ancestors,

@Deb2945533

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If you are writing the story, you face a choice between making the dialogue more natural, or emphasising foreignness. @Amadeus explains the first option in detail, so I will not reiterate. However, it is possible that you don't want the dialogue to be that natural: your POV character might be, for some reason or other, a foreigner to this environment, or telling to a foreigner, etc. In such a case, you can use the original foreign-language terms (transcribed in English), or you can use their meaning. For example, in Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, the MC has to adapt to a society with very detailed titles for every relative, and so you have:

“Oldest Son’s Wife, have all my senior daughters attend me.”
“Yes, Husband’s Mother.” She curtsied and left. (Robert A. Heinlein, Citizen of the Galaxy, chapter 7)

or

“As for you, Cross-Cousin-in-Law by Marriage, I’ll remind you—just once—
that my Adopted Younger Brother is senior to you. And I’ll see you in my
bunkie after dinner.” (Robert A. Heinlein, Citizen of the Galaxy, chapter 8)

The question becomes more difficult if, instead, you are translating a story from a language that has words for all those relationships to English, which lacks them. The translation should feel natural, as natural as it is to people reading the story in the original language. At the same time, the information about how each character is related to the others might be important to the story. In such a case, you would have to find a way to weave it in. That's the case where I'd go for the style @Totumus Maximus suggests. It might be redundant when you back-translate it, but you wouldn't back-translate it. In English, it would maintain both the natural manner and the information of the original.

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