: Switching languages within dialogue I'm writing a story which requires frequent switching between languages, sometimes in the same sentence. I thought about writing the foreign language in italics,

@Carla500

Posted in: #CreativeWriting #Dialogue #Formatting #Language

I'm writing a story which requires frequent switching between languages, sometimes in the same sentence.

I thought about writing the foreign language in italics, but the problem is that I already use italics for emphasis, so it's not consistent and would be confusing. Underline looks strange and color is not possible.

Example: I want to do something like this, where the italics would represent the non-English language and non-italics represents English.

Wow! You finally listened to my stinking advice!

This seems to read the best, as it's all in English, even if it looks a bit strange (and I would hope the reader would understand once I set up this device), but it's a moot point because I'm using italics for emphasis elsewhere already.

I thought about writing the other language in the actual foreign language, but I cannot reveal the language at this point. But even if I could, I'd still have to footnote every sentence, which is also cumbersome and makes the readability difficult.

Are there a tried and true techniques to do this?

Vote Up Vote Down

0 Reactions   React

Replies (1) Report

Login to post a comment!

@Debbie451

@Debbie451

Maybe enclose the words in some other punctuation?

Brackets:


"Wow! You [finally listened to] my stinking advice!"


Curly Brackets:


"Wow! You {finally listened to} my stinking advice!"


Guillemets:


"Wow! You «finally listened to» my stinking advice!"


Experiment with colons, asterisks, et al.

Vote Up Vote Down

0 Reactions   React

Replies (0) Report