In the story I'm writing, the main character goes to a foreign country to study at a boarding school. She learned the language in preparation for going there, but only knows enough to have a basic conversation, and isn't an expert. This will be a recurring theme in my work, so I wanted to know how would be the best way to describe a language barrier through dialogue? If anyone has any advice, I would appreciate it.
That's the story of my life when I went to Germany. I could sit there and tell you all day what that was like. Mostly it was the sense of isolation. It takes a tremendous amount of concentration to understand someone and eventually you resort down to tuning out. I kid you not, it starts to sound like "blah, blah, blah." You can't exactly go out and socialize. And no, not all Germans know English. Surprisingly very few of them do.
What POV are you using? If you're in first or close third, I'd say you can only tell us what people said if she understands it. So, for example: "The police are coming," he said in Lithuanian, and then he added a lot of other stuff I really didn't get. If you're in more distant third, you could say: "The police are coming," he said in Lithuanian. Then he added "and when they get here, they're going to throw your ass in jail." But Rebecca only understood the first part, not the second.
I would say take this real world experience and incorporate it into describing the way the character interacts with the world. Show us, through the character, the few words we would understand, the isolation the character feels because no one can understand them, and then the frustration and eventual dissecting of a conversation for words we/the character would know and tuning out the rest. This is also another way to do it if you want the readers to be ahead of the MC.
I'm struggling with this. I can imagine it would become quite arduous to read. Constantly using dialogue tags to state which language is being spoken will clutter the writing and beat the reader over the head with it. But if you don't specify it, then it might become unclear who is speaking which language at any particular time. There's also the problem that if you don't specify that somebody said something in a different language, then the dialogue doesn't reflect what was actually said. "Your dormitory is the third door on the left", she said in Portuguese. - This shows the reader that she didn't actually use those words, but a translation thereof. "Your dormitory is the third door on the left", she said. - This implies that the speaker actually said those English words. Sure, if you have established that this conversation is happening in Portuguese then the reader might remember, but every so often there will be English phrases and conversations, so you'll have to indicate every time it shifts from one language to another. She told me [in Portuguese] that my dormitory was the third door on the left. - Since you're paraphrasing and not actually quoting the other character, you don't need to worry about whether it's "correct" in terms of which language was being spoken. If you include the "in Portuguese" then it will clarify in which language the information was communicated; if you omit it, the reader might assume one way or another. I hope I've been able to explain this clearly. I just think it's going to be really difficult to get the balance between making sure the reader knows who is speaking which language to whom, and not making them feel fed up of hearing about it.
I had a similar issue a while ago, and when I could I tried to blend the language notifier into thoughts/description/other narrative. Like, X say Y, and Z's skull pounded as he tried to translate the French. Why couldn't they talk slower, at least? or X said Y, and Z let the familiar French wash over him like a cool shower at the end of a dusty ride. He was home. And I think I paraphrased more of the French dialogue than I usually would have, like, X wasn't impressed about Y and threw about ten different obscenities in Z's direction. Some French, some English, and some that were a pretty damn creative mix of the two.
I hadn't thought of some of those constructions. I guess if you mix them up enough, it will ensure the reader is clear on which language is being spoken without it becoming laborious to read.
