My story is written in English, but is set in my home country. What language should I use for the dialogue?

I've seen some examples in stories where the author writes the dialogue primarily in English but uses certain phrases written in the native language of the character with footnotes of an approximate translation of the phrase. That could help you give your story some individuality while keeping it available to an English-speaking audience.

posted over 5 years ago

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N. Dosker‭

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The purpose of nonfiction is to communicate information. The purpose of fiction is inducing particular emotional/mental states in the reader, although writers of fiction often intend it to be educational as well. If you're writing for a contest, you're probably aiming for creating the most favorable impression on the judges, so you should be considering how your choices affects that. You're not writing a foreign phrasebook, and the readers shouldn't have much trouble understanding that the English dialogue represents Tagalog speech. Writing dialogue in the local language and then translating breaks up the flow of the story, and reduces immersion, so that should be avoided unless you think that reducing immersion serves a narrative purpose. Whatever interaction a Filipino would have with the story as written in Tagalog, generally speaking evoking the same reaction in English speakers means having the story all in English.

Individuals words are a more complicated issue. There are going to be cases where there isn't a good translation of the word, and it's a judgment call as to whether to try to come up with a rough English equivalent, use the local term, or try some other strategy. There's also the question of what to consider "equivalent": if X has relationship Y to Filipino society, do you look for a word that Americans (or [insert nationality here]) would use to describe X, or do you look for a word that has relationship Y to American society?

Just as part of reading a new work means being introduced to new characters that one doesn't know at first, reading a work in a different cultures means being introduced to new terms that one doesn't know at first. Even in set in an English-speaking location, there could be new terms, such as a story set in Chicago introducing the L or explaining aldermen for people from a place with different political terms. So there's some leeway there, but don't go overboard.

If this were not for a contest, and instead something that you had more control over the presentation, such as hosting it on your own website, there would be more options, such as having the dialog be in English but hovering the mouse over it gives the Tagalog.

posted over 5 years ago

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Acccumulation‭

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If you are writing for an English speaking audience, then write in English

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ashleylee‭

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The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy is written in English, but when characters are speaking Spanish the dialogue is written in Spanish. Unusually, those parts of the dialogue are not translated, and not limited to short irrelevant sentences either, but those dialogues may span multiple pages. Now there are at least two reasons why your situation is different:

• Spanish is relatively similar and relatively much studied by English speakers, being a Latin language like French, and English having a lot of roots from Latin or French. Filipino is not even Indo-European and an entirely different language, and rarely studied in English speaking countries.
• Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi — McCarthy is a Pulitzer-prize winning author writing brilliant prose. He can get away with things that most authors cannot. He has Spanish language dialogue in other books such as Blood Meridian as well, but AFAIK none as extensively as in the Border Trilogy.

Therefore the other answers are correct.

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gerrit‭

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You have read books like this, or at least are familiar with books like this:

Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls is set in Spain, and it is indicated, repeatedly, that the dialogue is in Spanish, in fact in a particular dialect of Spanish. The main character's accent is even discussed. But the dialogue is written entirely in English.

Romeo and Juliet is set in Italy. I doubt Shakespeare even knew a word of Italian. He certainly used none in the play.

And of course, there are translated novels - they are translated in their entirety, the dialogue is not kept in the source language.

Think of it like this: your audience speaks English. Perhaps only English. In such a case, anything in any language other than English is incomprehensible noise. If the alphabet you use is not the Latin one, it's not even noise - it's squashed spiders on the page, that make no sound in the reader's mind. Why would you want to fill pages upon pages with "noise" that means nothing to your reader?

You're confused because what the characters actually say is not in English. But that doesn't matter at all; your goal is not to transport to the readers what the characters "actually say", untouched. The characters don't "really" exist anyway. Your goal is to make your reader share the experience of saying and hearing those words. The experience includes understanding.

The only exception I know of to the above rule is Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace. That work was written in Russian and French, no translations provided (though those are always added in modern editions). The reason it was written like this is that the audience Tolstoy was writing for was all bilingual. Everyone who could possibly read the novel in the author's time spoke both Russian and French. Thus, the book might appear like an exception, but it supports the aforementioned logic.

posted over 5 years ago

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Galastel‭

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Who is your audience? What languages do they know? If it's an international contest, are there language guidelines? If it says English Only, then be at least 99% English!

Are you planning on a few loanwords from Tagalog that are really hard to easily phrase in English? That sounds fine, especially if a reader can gather enough about them from context. (Example: perhaps a word describing a particular kind of flavor/texture that your grandmother's version of the dessert has, that this restaurant version does not have sufficiently.)

Often, if you're doing it to indicate private dialog, it may just be easier to use tags/description to state that.

"Jan and her father spoke quietly, in their native language, so no one else understood. They seemed to come to a decision."

or

"The parents talked. Jan heard a few words, like [whatever] and [whatever]. No matter how angry they were, when they spoke in [language], the language's [tonality? rhythms? some quality] sounded perfectly pleasant to outsiders."

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April Salutes Monica C.‭

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