: Re: Sign language in books If you have a character who is mute and uses sign language, how would you write what they’re saying? I don’t know if it’s literary appropriate to use quotes or

@Kaufman555

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Similar to other answers, I tend to do any language that is not the language of my novel (read: English) as translations. Typically to denote a language barrier between speakers and non-speakers I will give the foreign language an additional puctution to denote it's translated to English such that for a character using sign language I would do something like:

"{Did anyone hear that?}" Bill said in sign language.

Why a sign language user would ask if anyone Heard something is beyond me, but there's an example (I also prefer to use the Less Than (<) and Greater Than (>) symbols but they signal quote boxes so its hard to escape them. More preference than any real grammar reason. They were used to similar effect in Animorphs and Comic books, which is where I got my inspiration for them.)

I will note that the translation is perfect English and not direct translation. Sign language tends to lose articles for words and many languages are not ordered like English (romance languages don't have a wrong order, but typically the verb is the last word in the Sentance. German is ordered stricter than English, and Japanese may use English loan words for more recent concepts).

I would also recommend re-framing from idioms or puns as they rarely translate well.

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