starlady: Raven on a MacBook (Default)
Electra ([personal profile] starlady) wrote in [personal profile] kindkit 2011-09-28 07:51 pm (UTC)

Ah, the pleasure and dilemma of writing fic in translation.

I have various strategies that I use and abandon as I feel like--one of them is trying to compose the dialogue in my head in the source language, another is reverse-translating the dialogue into the source language after I've got it down. I try to be hyper-vigilant about diction and levels of speech, to try to approximate characters' speech styles, but it's so freaking hard, and there's so much richness that's lost.

The formal/informal you thing is the devil. I try to compensate by messing with diction a bit--make a line that contains a formal you more formal in general--but that's not very satisfactory a lot of the time. Another thing that can bring out the nuances is contrast with another character, but again, not always workable.

"Barrages"?

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