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I have a character who is Trinidadian in a story I am working on. The character is (very) well-educated, and so speaks the Queen's english quite well when he needs to. However, in social situations I'd like to convey that he slips in and out of Creole patois. However, I'm concerned it would get distracting for the reader to actually read the patois.
Any thoughts on how far to push the envelope with dialogue of this sort? For the record, the fact that he slips in and out of Creole is a nice flavor nugget in the bigger picture of the character and world around him, but isn't critical to the plot/story.
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I've read dialog interspersed with foreign words which could be understood in context. I've also read dialog where the the translation would be offered in parenthesis. My personal preference has always been the former.
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Be leery of spelling it like it sounds...not only is it hard on the modern-day sight reader, it leads to arguments about how it should be spelled if spelled-like-it-sounded.
In the few times I've tried to do it, I've tried more to use the phrasing and word choice rather than spelling or foreign words...I reread an old story where I had a guy try to filter his English through Haitian French. The story's a bust, but the dialog works...I may try it again someday. (I modeled it on some guys I knew from work.)
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Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses has large amounts of dialog in untranslated Spanish.
I could never pull something like that off, however.
I agree word choice would probably work best or maybe a remark about dialect/language shift. I don't like translated text right next to the foreign words. It throws the pace off and ends up being distracting.
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I read an older book once that wrote-like-it-sounds dialog for a Scottsman. It was so hard to read I began skipping over it to just get through the book. It's hard when you have to decipher dialog like that and really takes away from the enjoyment of the story.
I agree with the others. Use word phrasing and pacing to bring out a foreign accent. I feel it works much better than writing it as it sounds.
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It is a challenge to find the correct balance between getting your message across to the readers and not confusing or tiring them. An untranslated phrase every now and again, at points in the story where it would have the greatest impact, seems to be the way to go, from what I have seen. I have found that things translated in parentheses is very distracting and tears me away from the story (never a good thing!). If a translation is necessary, and the reader can't pick up the meaning fro context, you could arrange things so that he could have an outburst, and then when another character says, "huh?" he could apologize and translate or whatever. There are several ways you can do this successfully, and I would just play around until you find something, or a combination of things, that works.
The key is, as it often is, "less is more." Too much and it will be too distracting. You don't want it to draw attention to itself and disrupt the reader's sense of belief in the story. It takes some practice. Good luck!
posted
I like the suggestion of throwing in a patois word here or there. The other big thing you can use is odd diction or grammar that comes with an accent.
I have a character who speaks with what I think of as a Russian accent, but the only hint of that I use in the actual writing is to make his sentences read like someone who doesn't understand English particularly well.
"Yes, this is way to bar. Go around corner, you find."
I'm not sure if it would apply to someone with your kind of accent, but there are other things that people speaking certain languages tend to do even if they're fluent in English. One easy example is awkward overuse of the infinitive. In English, we don't use "the" nearly as often as people speaking French, Spanish, or Italian do, and I've often seen friends who were native speakers of those languages import their inclination to use le/la/el/l' and use 'the' instead.
I might say, "Weren't you just eating an apple?", whereas someone with that overused infinitive trait would ask, "Weren't you just eating the apple?" I'd hear them tell me all the time about how they took the taxi in from Center City (as opposed to a taxi). There are also traits you can use to make English sound foreign-ish to American ears, even if the speaker is from a country that uses English as its primary language.
For instance, I had an Irish roommate who always referred to teams in the plural, which I could never get used to: "Philadelphia are really playing well today."
Certain expressions work to aid that as well: "They'd have a chance of it if your man there could hold on to the ball. He's been acting like a complete gob****e all day."
Anyhow, just some ideas. I definitely think writing-as-it-sounds is not the way to go. Let the user's mind fill it with an accent, even if they aren't familiar with it. Your readers will thank you for the clarity.
Incidentally, my apologies if 'gob****e' is more profane than I think it is... I actually have no gauge on the level of that as a swear word, though I heard it a million times from my roommate.
Edit - Interesting... I didn't know we had auto-censoring on here, particularly as it just covered up the middle of a word. My mind is now racing for other legitimate words containing that as a substring.
[This message has been edited by micmcd (edited March 07, 2011).]
- Reading about implementing accents, readers get the idea if you use them VERY sparingly. One word every sentence or two might even be a little much. Once a reader hears the voice in their head, they don't need much reminding.
- Try having the character develop nicknames. For Creole, for example, have them refer to another character as chere or similar. For Spanish, it could be primo, miha, etc.
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Language is a beautiful thing to play with if you have the knowledge, but I agree with everyone about spell-it-as-it-sounds. That I’ve never seen done well. Even where it didn’t break the story, it was distracting and definitely didn’t add anything good to the story.
I agree wholeheartedly with micmcd, diction can give you the majority of it. This also might actually be one of those extremely rare cases of “tell don’t show.” You can mention how your MC “always slips into Creole” when such-and-such happens. Then when your word choice and phrasing is consistent with what you’ve told, your reader will hear it that way in their head.
I’ve also read stories that I loved that taught me a bit of a language. (It was a made up language in the one I’m thinking of, but still.) If you slowly dole out new words in such a way that they are clearly understood, repeat the use just often enough so that they aren’t forgotten, and very slowly combine them, you can pull it off.
One other thing that you can do to play with this, is to offer a phrase near the beginning that you do not explain the meaning of, then give the meanings of the various words throughout the story, finally wrapping it up with the fully understood phrase at the end, without ever needing to explain the phrase itself.
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I remember a translated American Indian speech that was so strange as the syntax and sentence structure was so different than what we use, but was fully understandable. Yoda is an exaggerated version of the technique but makes the point.
It will take some effort but you might have your person use the slightly different sentence structure to show that he is a speaker of a different language without it being bothersome. Look around for directly translated texts and see if there are clues as to what effects can be used.
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I came across a fantastic example of a French speaker who is technically fluent in English coming across as very foreign without hearing his voice.
Note - this is from a Canadian news site cnews, and the post itself is worth reading (it's a linked section of a longer post about the story). A french-speaking school board turned down a minor league baseball team's offer of discounted tickets to kids and faculty because the flyers weren't in proper French, and then sent this email in English to the team owner later.
Notice how frequently he uses the infinitive: "... to pay the guest for the conference and the lunch."
Also, "This year, event is held..."
Little grammatical mistakes like this make me hear the words in an accent, and if you look around for similar mistakes it can really help understand how to make your readers hear that without spelling as it sounds.
quote: Good day Mr MacDonald
Nicole transfert me the message, so here we go...
This event is done each year to say thank you to the school secretary and the board staff for their good work during the school year. We are 3 french school boards who partiicpate in this event. This is not a fundraising for the Boards, we are not allowed to do that.
This year event is held in Cornwall and we are looking for sponsorship of companies to buy some gifts for all the participants, to pay the guest for the conference and the lunch. If you like to donate, the amount is your decision. You could send it to Nicole and myself at the Board.
If you are interested to have our meeting at your place for next year (always in April or May), let me know and send me the information, the committe will have to decide at the next meeting. We need a room for 200 people and room for some companies who exposed their products. We also need the lunch.
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