: As someone who read a lot of Comic Books, this trope comes up and is usually handled by a format of an additional unusual punctuation mark and a note at the first use of what language

@LarsenBagley300

Vote Up Vote Down

As someone who read a lot of Comic Books, this trope comes up and is usually handled by a format of an additional unusual punctuation mark and a note at the first use of what language was being used such that...

"<"I am over here*,>" Jean replied. *Translated from French.

Please note that the quotation mark with in the less than sign is deliberate to escape issues with using the less than/greater than on this web page, specifically that they are used as part of the HTML code for formatting block quotes.

You could use the "Replied In French" quote you provided, I'm just demonstrating the use in comics. There is one problem that you don't have in comics, but what happens if we add a third character, Hans, who speaks German and wants to ask what Jean is saying... Comics deal with this by changing the color of the speech bubble background (So Charlie has White, Jean has Blue, and Hans has Red) but it's really hard to do that in a novel. Perhaps you could change the the symbol to a [] for Hans or a {}. Just keep the symbol and language associated with the change separate. K.A. Applegate's Animorphs series of novels series dealt with limited telepathic communications and denoted the communications with a <> and no quotes. She would later introduce characters who were full telepaths and denoted the more forceful telepathic speech with the <> and then underlying all the words inside the dialog.

This is better than italicizing changed dialog as italicizing is difficult to spot and for the readers to notice it consistently. Once the language is assigned by "Jean replied in French" the dialog can continue without having to note that the convention has changed. It also implies that the sentance is correctly spoken, which means you don't have to deal with the nightmare that is what I call "Hagrid Dialog" after the J.K. Rowling character from Harry Potter, who's dialog was peppered with deliberate misspelt words to make an accent. At times, it can be difficult to understand what Hagrid was saying... or another character who used a different set of misspellings to affect a different accented English.

As a final note, one of my favorite writing gags is that when a character with an American Accent and a character with a British Accent are sharing dialog, I denote the accent by using the British spelling of the words in the Brit's dialog. The American uses the American spelling, as does the narrator, who is basically speaking in my own vernacular.

I don't think its a bad thing to acknowledge bi-bilingualism to children as the United States does have a need for more bilingual speakers and with languages, its easier to learn young than old. One of my favorite writers in children's television, Greg Weisman, is a wonderful advocate for this and says one of his big creative regerts was not showing two Japanese characters speaking in subtitled Japanese until the English Speakers showed up, in which they switched to English Dialog. He has since made up with this in his later shows, such as Spectacular Spider-man and Young Justice (which even went so far as to make a constructed languages for Atlantean and Interlac, the latter being a one to one substitution cipher of the Latin Alphabet and English words.).

(0)

Login to post a comment!