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Q&A Switching languages within dialogue [closed]

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 ...

2 answers  ·  posted 4y ago by romebot‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T12:55:32Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/47894
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar romebot‭ · 2019-12-08T12:55:32Z (over 4 years ago)
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?

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2019-09-08T21:26:22Z (over 4 years ago)
Original score: 3