About dialogue

I have a question about dialogue. I have a character who bounces back and forth from English to Italian when she gets flustered. How do I have the Italian translated without breaking character? When she does it around her boyfriend, he translates it in his dialogue when he responds, but how do I convey it when she is in her head, or all alone, without her sounding silly?

 

Thanks

 

I appreciate it. Thanks.

 

I'm not a fan of mixing words from other languages in with the rest of my story be it through dialog or another way. Of course, I've seen it done and it can work, but I think it's just as effective to say the dialog in English and then add a tag to it or a line like, "Every other word came out Italian. It was something she fell into when she was flustered." I could understand that, but I know zero Italian. And I'm not going to read a novel in hopes of learning a foreign language so I don't really see the benefit of adding any actual Italian.

 

Great point, and an excellent suggestion. That helps and that works. Thank you.

 

My MC is Russian and bounces back and forth when he's upset. How I handle it depends on who's observing him.

For his inner thoughts, I know that technically most of his thoughts would be in Russian, but the majority of my readers don't speak Russian, and neither do I, so I have his thoughts in English as he would speak it, with the syntax slightly off. (I never write his accent, though.) I don't see this as breaking character, because he's eager to "Americanize" himself (his words) and improve his English, because he knows he can never go back to Russia (it's 1980, and he defected six years before). If he were in Russia thinking in English, that would be a lot more problematic.

When he gets mad, he swears in Russian or talks to himself in Russian to calm himself, but the character who usually observes this in an American who doesn't speak Russian. So if he came home from work perturbed by his day and she's observing this it would go something like, "He tossed his jacket on the chair, then muttered something in Russian and went to the fridge to get a beer."

If he's really mad, I might have just the swear word in Russian. But never whole sentences.

If you do it in Italian, be extremely clear about the context clues so your reader knows WTF is going on. It would irritate me and make me skim, frankly. I'm not pausing to Google, and I'm dyslexic, so translating something in my head trying to use the roots is often an exercise in frustration.

 

I'd suggest you find a native speaker and ask for a couple phrases/words that are more or less generic introductory words, exclamations, swaying phrases, etc. he or she would normally use in his speech. That'd be enough to show that your character's native language is different from English. Also, if your's character's English isn't good enough, you might consider the following tricks to show that:
- you know that in Roman and Slavic languages there are genders for the objects, that are all "it" in English. This is the mistake Italian/Portuguese/Ukrainian?Russian speaker would typically make in fast speech. Ex.: "See that table over there? Put the book on her." You just need to check the gender of the object with google
- if living among native speakers, we learn verbs needed to express what we need pretty fast, but sometimes might have difficulties with nouns. Ex.: "I'm having a problem (instead of an issue) with my PC." (I guess, this is a generic thing for all languages: when you have several synonyms, the one that seems more natural to you is the one that resembles a word you'd use in your native language for the same thing).
- Also, consider replacing some nouns that are rare to encounter in everyday life with Italian words for them. Ex.: stwepot=padella (or even with explanations of their functionality, "the thing you use to stew")
- Times. Yeah, English time alignment rules seem really stupid to normal people, lol We (I mean, Roman and Slavic languages speakers) don't really care about putting all verbs in one sentence in past or present tense, we mix them as we need, ex.: "I know that he was there yesterday."
- Also, feel free to put predicate in front of a subject in your sentences and skip pronouns "I thought that he was cute" = "Thought that he is cute"; "He is cute," thought I

 

This, with the caveat that some things will be different if the character has learned English by watching TV or movies. People who learn English from watching movies or TV tend to pick up the same slang as the characters or host of the show they enjoy watching, so that's thrown into the mix.

I highly recommend finding YouTube videos of interviews of people who are from the same country as the character, if the character is contemporary. I have an "inspiration Russian" who came from the same city as my MC and had been in the States for about the same length of time when the videos were filmed. I scribbled notes of key phrasings he uses, and whenever I'm in doubt as to how my MC might phrase something in English, I watch his videos.

 

Be careful with Russians in terms of this trick If your character is older than, let's say 25, he/she would more likely have that stiff language with uncommon words, especially if he ever started learning English at home, before coming to the USA. Soviet schools gave awfull knowledge of the foreign languages, mostly because teachers themselves never ever heard real English from a native-speaker. And those mistakes learned at school are really hard to get rid of, even when you hear everyone around you saying things in a different way.

 

Right. That's why I used the word "contemporary". My "Inspiration Russian" had a similar education to my MC. ETA: My WIP takes place in 1980, and neither knew English before moving to the States. During the Cold War, there was no English spoken where they went to school. ETA for clarification: My Inspiration Russian is of a similar age to my MC; in "real 2017" age they'd be like...4 years apart. Did that make sense? My MC would 60-something now, as is my Inspiration Russian.

Another thing I thought of is, the region of the US where a character settles makes a huge difference, so the English words one uses would be different depending on where the character lives. In one of your examples, you said "problem" with a PC" vs. "issue" with a PC. Where I live, speech is much more casual, so we would use the word "problem" even though we're native speakers. "Issue" would be much more formal English. In another region of the US that wouldn't be the case. ETA: So if the character is worried about assimilating, as mine is (it keeps him up at night) it will affect word choice.

 

Yeah, that's the second layer. But the main key is that English seems too "formal" and to some extent limited to people who are used to speak languages that allow more flexibility in how you make up the phrases and even words. For example, I always have to deal with that feeling "wtf, why not?" Why can't I just take any noun and make a verb/adjective out of it? This also refers to tenses, which seems to be an artificial restriction, thus needs thinking twice, which is not a thing you usually do in speech.

 

If it's any consolation, we Americans mix the heck out of it all, so you'd sound like one of us. ETA: There's a really good book called The Grammar Book for You and I oops Me" that covers the differences in formality between American English speech, academic English, and something in between if you really want to confuse yourself.

 

heh. back in the time I used to get a lot of feedback from my USA friends and colleagues that my English was "too correct" and Brittish )))
lol. now, after posting advice here, I've decided to check my own writing for this "accents" (I'm translating my stuff into English), and hell! I have all those mistakes in there Ok, maybe, tenses are more or less ok, cause I've used to double-check them, but the rest... And the worst are pronouns. "I took my hat off" - why two pronouns here? In Ukrainian, I'd skip "my"; in Portuguese, "I"; in fact - both, if this is an informal speech in any of these languages. So, what I have in text now is: "Took hat off", which is totally wrong, I guess

 

I have a friend from Germany who goes through the same thing. We figured out her English teacher is teaching British and possibly Canadian English.

"this accents" should be "this accent"

And yep, it's "I took my hat off" although I don't know why.