Here is a little guide-thingy I wrote especially for the people at , after seeing over and over people having…troubles, with the matter of writing a proper character speaking a different language.

I am not an expert, I don't claim perfection, and I don't speak that many different languages but I think the following will be good reading if you ever plan to try your hand at a "foreign" character. It's not that long to read (even if it might look a bit like it, I just have a tendency to make long phrases and stuff. In any case, I've bolded the core of my tips if you are too laz…busy to read it all), and hopefully it's also written in not a utterly boring way. Also, it is aimed at English-speakers, but it can be useful for anyone (though you need to understand English to read this XD (Ah also I should point English is my second language, by the way))

Without further ado, here is the (first chapter) of this little guide, titled:

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Accents, Foreign Languages and You!

The world is wide and filled with people that happen to speak all sorts of languages that aren't English. Chances are that the story/movie/game/whatever you decided to write fanfiction of contains such persons.

You can always decide to have everyone speak plain English, for the sake of clarity, or so not to complicate matters, and the such.

Or, you might decide to try and portray that difference of language, either by giving them an accent while speaking English, or even try your hand at writing in the foreign language itself. It's a nice idea and I commend you for integrating cultural depth to your piece, but especially if you don't know the slightest thing about the said language you're going to write about, please read the following tips and try to apply them, if you find them reasonable.

Writing Foreign Languages:

You wanna write, say, Italian, but you barely know four words of it? No problem, now with our best friend, Teh Internet (!!!), you can, and easily at that.

Just write the desired part in English, head to a site like altavista's Babelfish, paste in a box, choose "italian" and poof, you got it translated! Now, all is left is to copy/paste it back in your text, and voilà! All ready to send on …. not!

As you might have noticed if you ever translated something you didn't understand into English, the translations are sadly often ankward, wrong or unintelligible. It's an automated process and it's far from being perfect. And being a huge, world-known website, there are very high chances that people reading your story happen to be people speaking that foreign language, and will notice the crappy/senseless translations.

If you ever had to, let's say, build a piece of furniture from IKEA or a similar shop, and happened to fall on one of those hilariously badly translated directions booklet, you'll know it can be really cringeworthy to read.

Reading a fanfiction filled with butchered bits of your language is not particularly pleasing, and it really stops you from getting immersed into the story- even if it's otherwise great- because of the glaring errors poking at your eyes.

Of course, you can always say "F-them, this is all the effort I'm willing to do, I don't care if I'm butchering their language." but if you are reading this, I think you might be thinking otherwise. After all, the tips I'll give you are quick and easy to use:

First of all, when translating a piece of text, you might want to make sure you are using the most "proper" grammar and sentence structure- no abbreviations, do not use familiar terms, ect. (You know then drill from your English classes) And make sure of the multiple possible meanings of your chosen words. Because if you don't, you could be writing something as innocuous as "I'm your biggest fan!" and end up with a translation meaning "You are my fattest rotating fan!". I know nobody says "I am your greatest fanatic!" but at least the translator won't get mixed up with the appliance.

One way to verify if it got translated correctly is simply to take the resulting text and have it re-translated, this time in English. If the meaning hasn't changed greatly, chances are it does make some sense.

Then, once you got your translation, especially if it's for a single word, I suggest you do the following step (which I always do especially when I'm unsure if it really is correct): paste the word into Google (or whatever search engine you prefer). Do a search-

I suggest you do an image search at that. If you're trying to translate the name of an object, and the translated word brings picture of the said object in image search, then you know you are correct. You can even do this for common expressions: if "I love you" brings pictures of hearts with the translated words written on it, it's pretty obvious you got it right.

This method, while unorthodox, really does wonders to proofread your translation. Oftentimes I found out that what Babelfish gave me, while returning the correct result when I retranslated it, gave utterly wrong results while probing a little on Google.

Another great helper is Wikipedia. How? Often you try to translate something, but it's name is made of an expression that when translated directly word-for-word probably won't mean the correct thing. For exemple: the game "Hide-and-Seek" probably isn't called exactly that in other languages. No problem: search for the article on wikipedia. And once on the page, just look at the left bar: you'll see a list of the different languages this article exists in. If the language you need is in the list, click it, and you'll be directed to a page with the good foreign name for the same game.

You'll then notice that, for exemple, in German, "Hide-and-seek"'s name is a single word, "Versteckspiel", or in French one of it's name is "Cache-cache" which litterally means"Hide-hide"- you'd have gotten them all wrong and made no sense if you had translated directly.

Finally, this is all good but it's still "automatic" ways to proofread yourself, and while it can quickly and easily fix glaring errors, it won't necessarily make your text perfect, especially grammatically-wise. I suggest you go, for instance, on the very forums and ask if anyone speaking the language you wrote in could proofread you. I'm certain a person will come up and happily help to correct your text. (and if you need help with anything in French, you can try and message me, if I see the message I'd be happy to help too).

Of course nobody forces you to go out of your way to ask other people's help, but if you did follow some of my above tricks, then you already did nice efforts. :)

Writing Accents (and mixing two languages):

One of the ways you might use to convey a character's different linguistic identity, especially if you are writing about a movie/tv show/game where you hear the character speak, is to try and write their dialogues with an accent.

This can be nice, but it can also go really wrong, so I suggest you to be careful if you do this. First of all, because you can easily fall into stereotypes and clichés when writing accent, which can be offensive to your readers (for instance, writing a "generic asian person" talking like this: "Are you ronery? Me love you long time!" )

Also, when trying too much to imitate the words phonetically in written form, you can easily end up writing unintelligibly- or make it mighty hard/annoying to be read. ("Whaowt awr eeoo dooeen heyr maytee?") Even if the character really has an heavy slur, or speaks in the most piratey way, or rolls their "r" a lot, do not get carried away.

Being able to easily understand what they say is the most important part. Even if their accent is heavy in reality, you are not obligated to repeat it sound-for-sound in the written form. Plus, you might get annoying/redundant/ridiculous if you always need to point the accent: "Arr! How arrre you? That's grrreat to hearrrr. I am verrrry well myself…." (and so on for the character's every dialogue).

The reader's imagination can very well fill in for the accent: you can merely hint at it and emphasise only on certain words. Plus, the vocabulary you chose can tell of the accent.

Which brings me on the part about Mixing up words of the other language in the character's speech to emphasise the fact their first language is not English.

…this… this part is the trickiest, and the most easily misused for bad results.

First and foremost, you should NOT attempt to do this if you are NOT fluent, or at least comfortable with the other language.

This is the easiest way to make a character's speech utter blabbering gibberish for readers both knowing only English and knowing the second language alike.

(And I'll pinpoint the (in)famous exemple: If you want to plug Japanese in a story but all you know is a few common words you picked because you watch a lot of anime… FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD IN THE WORLD, don't start making your characters (and worst, your narrative) replace the English terms for those words all the time in a terrible mingled verbal diarrhea of the two languages. (*gasp*))

First, for people that do not speak the other language, it can become mighty annoying to have the character speech broken over and over with words they don't know the meaning of. Especially if you squarely replace key words all the time, they might end up not understanding what they say half of the time, and it'll be extremely straining. Falling from time to time on a sentence and going to translate it on Babelfish is common, but if you force them to go look up one word every three, you'll have lost those reader quickly.

Use moderation, and always keep in mind "Will someone not knowing these terms I use won't understand the story told here or will they need to look up into a dictionary every three words? Is the second language interfering with the general comprehension of the text?".

Secondly, you can again easily fall into cliché and stereotypes that will be extremely irritating/offensive to the people actually understanding the language.

For instance, don't go around faking a character talking French by adding "le" in front of random words, even if you saw it done in the Looney Toons with Pepe le Pew.

It's both a glaring proof of your ignorance, makes your story totally nonsensical and will only turn your character's speech in a sad parody. (I'd also point that ending all sentences with the character saying ",oui?" is another common cliché that will just have your character become quickly really annoying. After all, you aren't always ending your sentences with "yes", yes? You only do that when you actually ask for confirmation and not in any random place in your speech, yes? It will become annoying if you always do it, yes? (I see this commonly with French, but I see it done commonly with other languages, such as Russian, da? Or German too, ja? I hope the message is clear, yes?)

Also, lots of languages, like Spanish, Italian, French, and so on, have a distinction between feminine words and masculine words, and if you carelessly sprinkle your texts with random words without really knowing what you are doing, you will make a bunch of gender-related errors that once again will make your speech wrong.

And let's face it, when your super manly characters wrongly refers to himself one time every three as a she (or something), it's really hard to take your character seriously.

I don't mean not to mix up words from your character's main language in their speech, but I'll have you think about how to do it intelligently.

First of all, follow the logic: if the character is clearly fluent at English (ex: living since years in a English-speaking area and having all Anglophones as friends), he or she shouldn't be speaking in a very broken fashion.

Also, if you do speak another language, you should know yourself that when speaking in that language, you usually make efforts to speak it properly and aren't replacing a word every two just for the heck of it. Usually you slip up and speak in your own language when you have a blank and forgot the equivalent, or if you don't know the translated term at all. You might have a tendency to keep using some English expressions too "Like saying "Goodbye!" instead of the language-equivalent) but you usually do when you know it won't interfere with people understanding you. You can also keep stuff like terms of endearment, insults, curse words and even using the English official names of places, but unless you really know nothing but a few scraps of a language, you will try and speak it most of the time.

Thus, when writing a foreign character that is supposed to know English good enough, don't have them plug words in their language just for the sake of rubbing it your readers in the face "Hey! Do you see? This character is foreign! Look at them using foreign words! Don't forget: this character is foreign!"

Finally, for both accents and terms, be careful about the character's proper origins.

The different languages and dialects from Asia often have nothing in common so make sure you are not putting a generic Japanese accent + assorted vocabulary to a Korean. And, even if two places in the world do speak the same language, the common vocabulary and accents may vary greatly (just like you know a British and a Texan, while both speaking English, won't sound the same). Thus, you might wanna do a little research, maybe just go and listen a Youtube video, if for instance you gotta write a French Canadian character, just to make sure. You'll find out it sounds nothing like the usual, well-known cliché of the Parisian accent.

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With that, this long-winded semi-rant of a guide is over for now. I might come later with tips and tricks on different matters. Thanks for reading, good luck with your writing and congratulations for caring about doing it right! :)

-She Who Dances Under The Moon