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BlueWorldComics
Apr '23

For a book intended for English readers, how would one go about implementing non-English dialogue? Should I just type it out in the language it's spoken in and let the readers fend for themselves for translations? Or should I somehow, some way include a translation... If the latter, how?

And if anybody has any books they can recommend that I can check out for research purpose, let me know :pray:

Thank you

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    Apr '23

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joannekwan(ง ˙o˙)ว here to help~
Apr '23

If it's just a sentence or word here and there I'd leave it in its native language, especially if there are context clues for readers to get the gist of what's going on.

However, if it's whole dialogues, I would definitely translate it and denote it's being spoken in the other language in a certain way. Some people use italics or a different font, or you could write it normally and have dialogue tags like "X said in Mandarin."

moontokkym
Apr '23

If you're in 1st person or 3rd person limited narration and the narrator character does not understand the language, put it in the original language. If it's full dialogue with 3rd person omniscient or the narrator character does understand the language, I'd say translate into the book's language as closely as possible.

Basically the idea is that the audience should understand as much as the character observing the dialogue does. Barely anyone is going to look up translations, especially if there's more than one line in that different language, they'll give up on the translations and possibly even the book if it gets too frequent. The only way to make that work is if the narrator character also does not understand so they can still read the book without feeling left out.

I've never really seen it done any other way in novels, in comics the best I've seen is Stand Still Stay Silent where language is a big part of the book's theme so a lot of page time is dedicated to telling the audience which characters speak which languages (almost all of them being multilingual) and what language they're speaking is shown with a little flag in their speech bubble. If multilingual people are going to be a big part of your novel, spending time saying who speaks what and how well the others understand can be a good thing to note, and then occasionnally saying " "bla bla bla" he said in french."

cherrystark
Apr '23

I would also do tags like this. If you aren't a native speaker of the language, you run a big risk trying to rely on translation software. I think you might be okay with smaller words and phrases like slang to be written in their original language. As long as you don't say "X, the ____ word for ___" every time you write it, you should be good. haha.

BoomerZ
Apr '23

Do whatever you can to not confuse the reader. Unless you really want the reader to not know what is going on (example: the character is talking to a foreign person and he is not suppose to know what they are saying), just put it all in english if its for english readers. The whole point of a novel is to be read, don't make it hard to do that. In comics you can use the < sentence > and a dialogue box to say they are speaking in whatever language they are. In a novel I would just skip it altogether.

BlueWorldComics
Apr '23

Bump in case anyone else has any new insights or examples.

For further clarification, a character in my book is Mexican and his mom insists on speaking Spanish in the house. So everything she says in the house will be in Spanish in an otherwise English-speaking book.