Such as one character speaks German while the other speaks Korean?
How do you show the two speaking their language to the other character but also so the reader can understand both of them?
Like hey this character is speaking a foreign language, how do I show my readers that this character is speaking so and so but can also understand what that person is saying but my main character cannot?
Jan '16
Jan '16
There's a ton of ways you can do this! You could give the two languages different fonts or different word balloon styles (Asterix109 did this a bunch). I've seen < these kinds of brackets > used to distinguish a foreign language often, and it's been pretty intuitive for readers when I used that in my comic. I've seen a comic use subtitles when the other language was really supposed to feel foreign to the readers, but that's sorta clunky if you're going to need it a lot (and also requires that you know the language in question).
Whatever you do, as long as your characters make it clear what's happening, like
Character 1: < Excuse me, sir? >
Character 2: I don't understand German, I'm sorry.
then your readers will go "ahh, okay, the brackets/different word balloon/different font/whatever means that guy is speaking German, got it" and you're good.
I've seen two ways of doing this in traditional print-comics, which I think works well enough in webcomics too:
If it's a short piece of dialogue, and it's important that it comes across to the reader that the two characters don't understand each other, write the foreign words just as they are, and then do a footnote translating it at the bottom of the page. This works best for short pieces of dialogue, because you don't want to fill the margins of your comic with translation-notes.
If it's a longer piece of dialogue, or if it happens throughout a scene, use the that @shazzbaa mentioned. They've always been easy to understand as far as I'm concerned.
@shazzbaa is right. This is the comic speech convention for foreign languages.
Brackets are a convention, but not the most appropriate for every situation. I couldn't use brackets in my canonically bilingual comic. Why? There's language A, which is the tongue most commonly spoken throughout the story. More than 95% of the lines are in this language. Then there's language B, the less common one.
Normally, in such a situation, you put brackets around every line in language B. But I couldn't do that because... the effin' main character speaks that language! He does speak language A a little, but he's far from fluent.
Brackets say "this is the OTHER language." In my case, neither language is "the other one." Both are main languages, for different reasons.
I wound up using different fonts + different colors. Here's an episode93 that has lines in both languages. It's very long with multiple images, so it might take a while to fully load.
Another non-bracket example I've seen is actually putting the language/country symbols in every bubble. There is one comic that does it really well. I can't find it at the moment, but it worked.
People have mentioned this already, but yeah, writing in the characters' foreign language through word bubbles and translating it at the bottom of a panel/page is one good way to handle the problem.
This is a small example, but I think it's worth bringing up. This is from my own comic Zeroes.80
I use guillemets (the aforementioned brackets) because I only have one foreign language present in my comic -even though canonly it's based on an actual language, it's a dialect that doesn't exist in real life.
Personally, I'm iffy on using the actual language in writing? It's really only when I don't know much about the language itself other than passing knowledge (like how to say sock or something useless). It's more of a worry of 'oh god what if a native speaker tells me the translation is wrong' :y even with translation websites, they don't pick up on metaphorical things and always translate things literally. There's ways to get around it but eugh, the worry of someone telling me it's wrong gives me the chills!
The way I've seen it before in some comics is that, they would still write in English but at the beginning of the speech, they would add an asterisk and include a "in __ language" below the panel.
I have another comic where the character speaks several languages. The speech bubble colors would indicate whether the character was speaking English or the 'other' language. Both dialogues were written in English, just the speech bubbles and fonts were different :3.
It's a problem we're gonna have to try and solve soon, too. I'm thinking of using brackets as @shazzbaa suggested , but I'm also thinking of just using the other language as it is if it's implied one of the characters can't understand it (Unless it's something important to the reader, of course) Different speech bubbles also seems like an interesting idea I might play around with.
This week we had some signs in Russian which I just translated at the bottom, and people seem to like it enough - the only issue here is having enough space for the "subtitles."
