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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33363
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33363
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

You might look at "War and Peace" to see the effect of large parts of text being written in a foreign language: it is a book in Russian, with a significant part of the dialogues between nobles being in French. When Tolstoy was writing this, he could expect his readers to be bilingual. Nowadays, Russian publications all have the French sections translated into Russian in the footnotes, while translations to other languages get to choose between this, and just translating the whole thing straight, and marking the relevant parts as "having been in French". So, as a reader, unless you're bilingual, you'd be reading the whole text in one language, only some of it would be more clunky. Which seems to suggest "forget the original language". JP Chapleau gives a good explanation of how to do this.

There are exceptions, of course. Tolkien incorporates into his writing phrases, and even whole poems, in the elven languages, sometimes translated, other times not. The reader, obviously, is not supposed to understand what is being said in those cases. Neither does the POV character. The purpose of those (very brief) inserts is not merely to say "elves speak a foreign language". It is to convey a pleasant (or unpleasant when it's Dark Speech) _sound_ of a language, the words of which are not understood. You might, for example, have a character saying something in a foreign language that sounds like something else in English, causing a misunderstanding. In that case, you'd want to incorporate the foreign language, as it is the sound that's important, not the content of what's being said.

Original score: 2