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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/43371
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/43371
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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.

Original score: 76