Hi! Recently I had an idea for a novel in which the main character speaks and thinks in English, but where most of the dialogue is in French, and I'm interested in seeing if there's any sort of interest in or market for such a thing. I'll probably fiddle with it anyways to practice my French because I find the concept interesting, but I want to know if anyone would like to (try) reading it!
It'd be a pretty limited market, I'd say. You'd need to find fluently bilingual readers who are also interested in the style/topic of your work. If you're prepared for that... it might work. (My French isn't good enough to really read a novel in it. I can get the general gist, but I can't really enjoy the subtleties)
Reading classic literature where there is a lot of untranslated French, Latin, and occasionally Greek is enough to drive me crazy, I think you'd be limiting yourself to a crazily small pool of readers.
Yes. There is also some of this in contemporary literary fiction, though not as much. I don't like it if there's a lot of it and no attempt to provide a translation.
The actual writing of the novel will occur, albeit at a slow pace – I'm mostly creating it to amuse myself and practice my own French. It's set in a fantasy realm where each kingdom has its own real-world language, the main ones used in the novel being English and French. The main character is from the English-speaking country but learns more and more French over the course of the novel; as such, all of the thoughts of the character are in English, but most of the dialogue is in French. I'm still learning French myself, so when I say dialogue I do mean very basic and everyday phrases, but most words contained in quotation marks will not be English. I'm fully aware that there might not be a large market for such a book; I just wanted to know if there was one at all.
I'm not multilingual, but I'd be really interested in this, actually. Would you want to write it in such a way that a non-bilingual reader could infer everything that happens in the dialogue? That'd be an interesting experiment in seeing how much French you could subliminally teach the reader. I watch some anime and prefer subtitles to dubbing, and I know I've picked up a teeny bit of Japanese from that -- the same thing happened when I watched Miraculous, which is French. Seems kind of analogous. Anyway, seems like your market is me
It would be interesting to see how much I'd have to recap the dialogue in the internal monologue; would it be too much for the bilingual reader who understands the dialogue? It would be a challenge, trying to add something new to each piece of dialogue in a way that informs the reader as to what the dialogue is. BTW I love Miraculous One of my fondest French-learning memories is spotting an overly literal fanslation when I was watching it fan-dubbed on YouTube.
Agree that the market would be tiny. Just finding people to read a book in one language is no small feat, let alone two. Cormac McCarthy does something with Spanish. He'll have entire conversations in Spanish (most notably in the Borders trilogy) with no translations because Cormac doesn't explain things, which is why we love him. My Spanish isn't great but I could follow along most of the time. Even if you couldn't, his prose is mind bending enough that most people probably don't notice.
Yeah -- balancing it out so that people who do understand French aren't annoyed by the repetition, and also so that people who don't understand French aren't annoyed by the extra lines that mean nothing to them. If everything is just transliterated immediately after it's said, you start to wonder why it's not 'dubbed' in the first place. I think to do it effectively you'd want to skip recaps as much as possible and just include enough body language / action / internal monologue so that people understand what's going on from context. MC thinks "I need to ask her where the nearest grocery store is," he walks up to her, there's dialogue and she points down the street, makes the motion of going around a corner, he thanks her and goes along. No English necessary. Obviously trickier for more complicated things. Some transliteration would probably be necessary, but I'd want to avoid it as much as possible. This is making me want to write a short story to play around with the idea, but I'm definitely not brave enough to try it for an entire novel, hahah. More power to ya on that one. I think the next season of Miraculous is supposed to be on netflix soon. I'm excited
Yes, that was my reaction as well. And further down, the OP says they are 'learning French' just now, so I think they might also be hampered by the fact that their own grasp of French will be that of a learner, not a fluent speaker. So there is unlikely to even BE much in the way of subtlety. This could work in her favour, by the way. If the character thinks in English and speaks in French, but is just learning French? That could be an interesting twist. The character might struggle to make sense to the people on the other end of the conversations, which could work into the plot. However, whatever floats the boat. If the OP wants to try writing something like this, fair enough. It will be interesting to see if she can get it to work.
