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A formatting question
Jan. 27th, 2015 11:03 amI've been writing an epic story, and within that story, a lot of the dialogue is taking place in French. I'm not a person who thinks that writing something in a foreign language and then immediately translating it into English is a good way to handle foreign dialogue, nor is throwing in a few words here and there, so for the most part, I've been using the translation convention of writing everything in English with the implication that the bilingual main character is translating as he goes.
However, my original plans to indicate someone speaking in French by using Italics is now not working so well, due to the sheer amount of French being spoken in some scenes. Basically any piece of dialogue is now in Italics, and Italics are distracting to read and draw attention to themselves. So, my question is, can I get away with starting off the dialogue with a 'he said, in French' tag and hoping my readers will assume the conversation continues in French until otherwise indicated? The problem with that is that there's no visual cue for when the languages change, which makes everything sort of fuzzy. And mixing the two options has a lack of consistency which might make it even more confusing.
If it were a oneshot, I wouldn't worry about it, but if I get it done, it's going to be several chapters with an increasing amount of French as it goes along.
( Examples and options )
So, any thoughts on this matter? Which do you prefer to read? Any other suggestions on how I could format it? Would it be better if my journal style didn't render Italics in a different colour?
However, my original plans to indicate someone speaking in French by using Italics is now not working so well, due to the sheer amount of French being spoken in some scenes. Basically any piece of dialogue is now in Italics, and Italics are distracting to read and draw attention to themselves. So, my question is, can I get away with starting off the dialogue with a 'he said, in French' tag and hoping my readers will assume the conversation continues in French until otherwise indicated? The problem with that is that there's no visual cue for when the languages change, which makes everything sort of fuzzy. And mixing the two options has a lack of consistency which might make it even more confusing.
If it were a oneshot, I wouldn't worry about it, but if I get it done, it's going to be several chapters with an increasing amount of French as it goes along.
( Examples and options )
So, any thoughts on this matter? Which do you prefer to read? Any other suggestions on how I could format it? Would it be better if my journal style didn't render Italics in a different colour?
