: Re: Writing dialogues for characters whose first language is not English I am seriously wondering how to go about writing dialogues for characters whose native language isn't English and who aren't

@Fox6458700

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I am seriously wondering how to go about writing dialogues for
characters whose native language isn't English and who aren't very
fluent in English. It's very hard, because people have different
levels of fluency, and it may also be kind of offensive to write
dialogues with several grammatical mistakes.

Personally, I think this is one of those things where you have to go out literally and gain some personal experience. You have to meet people. At my own workplace, I meet a ton of people who don't speak English as a native language. I can hear the accents in the voices, but if the grammar is perfectly legit, then I become blind to the accent. But when I start to misinterpret things, the other person will notice immediately and repeat the original sentence.

If I were writing down the experience in a story, then I would write everything from my POV. The narrator in the story is me; the character who speaks English poorly is based on a real person.

See what I have done here? Instead of using my own imagination of a non-native English speaker, I just use my own interactions with a true non-native English speaker and turn those interactions into a story. Ta-da! Problem solved.

However, I would only do that, if I were actually writing a story in English.

If I were writing the story in Chinese to a Chinese-speaking audience, then this is a really good question. In the story, I may use all foreign/non-Chinese names, like 马克，大卫，玛丽亚，丽莎，安娜, to show that these people are non-Chinese. These people will do distinctly American/Western things, like dipping biscotti in Starbucks coffee. Sure, you can find Starbucks in China, but natives will still associate the food and drink to Western cuisine. For the dialogue, I am just going to pretend that they are speaking naturally in Chinese. The main purpose is to use dialogue to move the story along. However, if a character intentionally wants to learn Chinese Mandarin, and the author wants to show the cultural and linguistic conflict between the learner and Chinese buddy, then grammatical errors and pronunciation errors may be included.

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