If I am writing from the first-person perspective of a non-English speaker in first person, what should I do?
I have a character in a book I wish to write in the first person; however, one of the main characters who narrate lives in China. He speaks only Cantonese and Mandarin, so it's a problem, but it is important they only speak these languages and live in China. What should I do?
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Think about it this way: surely you've read literature translated from another language? For example, Les Miserables, set in France. All characters speak French. Hugo doesn't need to tell you that they speak French, or that no character knows a word of English - the setting does that. You might be reading in English, but you know it's not really English the characters are speaking.
The way I usually think about it is this: the language the story is written in is transparent, "mother-tongue", "vanilla". Other languages are various flavours of "foreign", which I might be using in the story for various reasons. What happens when your in-story "foreign" is the language you're actually writing in (for example, your Chinese character comes to America)? You focus on how your POV character would see things. If he doesn't understand what's being said to him, you write "X said something I did not understand".
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I see no reason you would do anything differently than if you were writing about an English-speaking character.
I'm English. I can't speak any language other than English. But as a massive anime nerd, I have several stories - including one in first-person - that take place in Japan, with Japanese-speaking characters. They are written entirely in English, but I do use Japanese words that don't have English equivalents, as well as Japanese honorifics like -san and -chan. These help subtly remind readers that, even if the story is written in English, the characters aren't actually speaking English.
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