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I'm writing a story which requires frequent switching between languages, sometimes in the same sentence. I thought about writing the foreign language in italics, but the problem is that I already ...
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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/47894 License name: CC BY-SA 4.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
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I'm writing a story which requires frequent switching between languages, sometimes in the same sentence. I thought about writing the foreign language in italics, but the problem is that I already use italics for emphasis, so it's not consistent and would be confusing. Underline looks strange and color is not possible. Example: I want to do something like this, where the italics would represent the non-English language and non-italics represents English. Wow! _You finally listened to my_ stinking advice! This seems to read the best, as it's all in English, even if it looks a bit strange (and I would hope the reader would understand once I set up this device), but it's a moot point because I'm using italics for emphasis elsewhere already. I thought about writing the other language in the actual foreign language, but I cannot reveal the language at this point. But even if I could, I'd still have to footnote every sentence, which is also cumbersome and makes the readability difficult. Are there a tried and true techniques to do this?