Question
I brought this up with Seppo, but I'm running into a rather peculiar issue. My story is about an ex-pat in Japan, and the dialog switches between English and Japanese. But, if it were really written in Japanese, it would be hard for those who don't speak the language to actually understand, I figure. So now, I'm looking for a way to denote when they're talking in Japanese, as opposed to English. I'm using italics for now, while Seppo recommended a different font, anybody else have any cool ideas?
5 Comments:
Some of the common ways I've seen it done in the past is with brackets or with font differentiation. Another way is to simply say the dialog is in Japanese or English, or subtly denote when a character only speaks English or Japanese, so that your major characters can be assumed to be speaking the appropriate language with that person. Giving them strongly "ethnic" (I hate this word, btw) names can help clue in the reader.
If the conversation is between two characters who might be speaking in either language, you'd have to clarify by saying something like, "... he stumbled over the unfamiliar English words" or something.
I have a bunch of novels at home that deal with people who speak foreign languages. I'll give them a peek to see what they do.
I like the fact that we've now got another NaNoWriMo icon, now that we've got another author onboard. :D
:D I aim to please.
yeah, I've mostly seen it with <Foreign stuff> brackets. MegaTokyo does this.
I'm a big fan of using different fonts for this sort of thing but that's probably just because I'm a freak of nature who loves fonts.
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