Bilingual/multi authors, how do you imagine the dialogues in your head? Do you take inspiration from your other language(s)?

[jr3indisputable]

How do you write while knowing different languages? Is English your default?

I immigrated to the US while knowing very little English, but even so, it is still the default dialogue in my head. I'm curious what others think about this.

Feel free to post your novel that is relevant to the topic.

[smokesalty]

English is not my first language, but I'm much better at it. Everything I write is in English by default, as I mainly speak and think that way. So in that way English is the default for me.

So while I am fluent in Serbian (with grammatical mistakes galore) I have a very hard time reading it! But I think being bilingual is a great opportunity to write a character with the same background as me, and I'm surprised I haven't done it yet honestly.

I think in some sense, learning two languages can help you better understand structuring English. What I mean is that when switching between the two, you have to know the different "right and wrongs" of each language. Like Serbian has literally everything gendered, which changes how you refer to things. English comparatively is a bit of a relief cos you don't have to gender when you're talking about yourself, other people and objects a lot of the time.

But yeah, if I were to write in Serbian, I'd need to get what I write checked and edited. And that sounds like an absolute hassle.

[AmysGames]

So I'm not exactly bilingual, but I've been learning Japanese, and like to think I'm pretty decent at it? In any case, one thing I like to do for practice is attempt to write scenes from my comic in Japanese, to see if I can convey the same concepts in a different language.

Aaannnddd it's getting to the point where some of the dialogue feels more natural to me in Japanese than it does in English. Not sure how to feel about that.

[allenT]

Comparing to peers, I'm actually pretty weak on languages, even my mother tongue Chinese. However maybe because I'm so used to reading English from internet for a long time, I happen to visualize my dialogues in English first, then re-work into Chinese afterwards.

I think my English version is better when expressing feelings, and feels awkward writing them in Chinese maybe because the difference in languages... But in the mean time, my Chinese version actually is more casual & fun (with a bit more context).

[RedLenai]

I think everything in Spanish, but correcting text, putting dialogue or making notes of certain panels for myself, is in English

[vapidink]

English is my default, even though it's my second language. I've been better at it since I was around nine, but I moved to the US young, so I hadn't mastered my native tongue. Still fluent in it, but I just have more practice with English. Also, for some reason, I don't like reading in my mother tongue, so that didn't help, lol.

[KevinReijnders]

Despite being native Dutch speaking, I have always done my creative writing in English. For some reason I can't stand to write fiction in Dutch, it just sounds horrible haha.

[darthmongoose]

This is a really interesting thread.

Being British, I'm a native English speaker of British English, and I have a degree in Japanese. I've found that if the dialogue is going to be primarily in a language, it's a lot easier to think it in that language than to think it in your own and then to translate, even with say, British English to American English, because I feel like it'll come across in the drawings. Your whole posture can kind of change when you speak another language, or there are phrases that would make a really impactful beat panel in one that you just can't quite translate. Like in Japanese, just saying a person's name without an honorific for the first time can be a really powerful beat panel on its own... and in English it's like... okay, he said her name, what's the big deal? The rhythm is just so different.

It's like... if I'm drawing a panel, and I know the person is saying: "Ah! Sakura-chan, genki?" it feels weird to draw it while thinking "this person is saying "Hi, Sakura, what's up?"" because... it feels like the bodylanguage or posture for saying those phrases is so different? Anyone who speaks two languages can probably vibe with this, how it's like switching modes.

I think even if you're switching between British and American English it's a thing. If I'm drawing an American character saying "Hey, dude, what's up?" I wouldn't draw it while thinking, "Areet, mate what's t' craic?" (That's my native Cumbrian dialect Northern English. Yes, it's completely unintelligible to even a lot of native English speakers) they're almost different languages; American English often has a different rhythm, and uses different words, but also the whole way the voice is placed in the mouth gives it a different "posture" when you speak it.

I think it could be used to great effect if you're making a comic for an English-speaking audience, but want it to feel authentically like it's in another country or community, to think of the lines in the native language first and then translate, making it feel like the English reader is reading a translation.

[llobucervallince]

thinking, and writting on english, then I translate to spanish

[Llyrel]

I write the script for The Emergency Coven directly in English. This is for a few reasons:

-Sentence structure in my native language, Italian, is very different. A direct translation can often result in clunky and unnecessarily long sentences that feel too "literary" and not realistic at all. To make the dialogues sound believable, I'd have to rethink the sentence structure entirely to fit English, which... would basically mean doing double the work :'D
-My English is not as refined as my Italian I mean, I AM fluent (got a C2 certification and all), but I am not as familiar with the subtleties of English language. Meaning that I tend to keep it simple. And I much prefer working directly with short, simpler sentences in English than coming up with beautiful, fancy sentences in Italian... which I wouldn't know how to translate XD
-Puns and figures of speech. Most of them are either completely different or impossible to translate, meaning that a joke that would work perfectly in Italian would mean absolutely nothing in English and vice versa (ask those poor Terry Pratchett translators ).

That said, there are some instances in which I use Italian first... and that is usually when I have no idea how to write something directly in English, but still want to take notes, so I just write it down in Italian and then look it up later.

[ladyofthedarkwoods]

My native language is Norwegian, but I feel that it’s a lot easier to express myself in English. I’m married to an English speaker so I’ve been speaking English daily for the last 12 years, and I only think in English these days Writing in English feels natural compared to my native language, anything I write in Norwegian just sounds strange lol. As a kid I always preferred to read books in English compared to Norwegian. I would rather look up all the words I didn’t know than read the translated version

[AmysGames]

Your whole posture can kind of change when you speak another language, or there are phrases that would make a really impactful beat panel in one that you just can't quite translate. Like in Japanese, just saying a person's name without an honorific for the first time can be a really powerful beat panel on its own... and in English it's like... okay, he said her name, what's the big deal? The rhythm is just so different.

I agree, and this probably contributes to my earlier comment about how sometimes my dialogue feels more natural in Japanese. Each language has its own nuance and culture that sometimes doesn't translate very well into other languages, e.g. the whole honorifics system that exists in Japanese.

Similarly, there's stuff I can say in English that's a lot more difficult to convey in Japanese, like the subtext of this panel (technically a minor spoiler for my comic since the page isn't out yet):

Do spoiler boxes work anymore

Stuff like this, plus the fact that a huge amount of popular media today is written in English, might be why the majority of people here have said they'd rather write directly in English rather than attempting to translate.

[jr3indisputable]

I agree, there are certain phrases in my native that I would love to include in my novel! But it's not as effective when I try to translate it. A shame, really.

[Emalie]

My first language is Spanish. But writing in English and thinking about how I have to convey something with my story has really helped me improve my writing compared to how it was, I don't know, two or three years ago.

There are expressions in Spanish that I would like to share and I try to interpret them the way they would be written in English, an arduous task but I love to challenge myself.

[TheLemmaLlama]

I don't, but then again I'm probably not bilingual enough for this question (I can speak fluent Chinese, but can't write it :P) It mostly influences my story via worldbuilding; negligible influence on my current slice-of-life comic