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Topic : Re: Believable (but easy) archaic English Do you know any "shortcuts" to translating passages of my story into believably sounding archaic English? I mean, without taking a full school course? A crash - selfpublishingguru.com

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Read a lot of old books, prereferentially related to the topic of your own story. Get a sense of the idiom, like a sailor referring to himself as an old salt. Get it under your skin. If you constantly need to consult a phrase book, a grammar or a style manual, I'm afeared ye can nae pull it off.

In other words, if you don't feel you can write the original text in the language of your choice, you are probably not ready to write it.

Translation is in any case not a 1:1 rendition. Words and concepts might not even exist in the target language, and complete restructuring of sentences may be required. You would also need to consider that although you want an old feel, you would also want your modern reader to understand it effortlessly; so you probably shouldn't go the whole hog - depending on how old you want it: Victorian English is rather readable, medieval, not so much.

Another option is to simply develop believable characters. Let them talk and interact like they would, and language doesn't strictly need to be old, because it wasn't old to them. The movie "A Royal Affair" is set in historical Denmark, but the characters speak modern Danish. It's odd at first, but once you're pulled into the story it just doesn't matter.


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