If you're writing in some language, and the characters speak slightly differently-- e.g., they're from America in the fifties and you're from Britain today-- I think it can work better to write as the characters speak.
If you're writing in one language and your characters speak an entirely different one-- say, you're writing in French and your characters speak Aramaic-- I'd go for equivalent effect where etymology is unobvious or utterly irrelevant.
Whether etymology is obvious or relevant is a subjective judgment. For me, if I'm writing about a fantasy world where everyone is totally blind, the characters will still see each other's points. On the other hand, if I'm writing about a fantasy world where mammals don't exist, it's probably raining snakes and lizards.
Unfortunately, there aren't necessarily sharp dividing lines between languages. Since it's a common one for fantasy writers, take the history of English as an example. There's no point in time that you can specify for which everything said after that point is comprehensible enough and everything said before that point is a different language. Most native English speakers would find, say, Jane Eyre comprehensible; most native English speakers would have difficulty with Shakespeare's idioms but get the gist of he plot (but that misses the point, since it's supposed to be funny and isn't about getting to the end!); most native English speakers would not understand Beowulf without studying the (foreign?) language in which it was written. At which point do you decide it's different enough to translate? Are all of those different enough to translate? Then what about the nineties? What about the various dialects of English?
On which topic, how do you translate a low-prestige dialect? That can be a plot point, but do you choose an existing low-prestige dialect? What if you speak only a high-prestige dialect? Should you make up a low-prestige dialect? Borrow the traits of the existing one in the other language?
In Not Without Laughter, Langston Hughes used dialect for dialogue, and standard American English for narration. I think that technique would have been less successful if the story had been written in the first person, or if the third-person narration had been much tighter. But in that case, the dialect is meant to be apparent, because it exists and has a right to exist. It's also a real-world dialect; would the same style work in elseworld fantasy?
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Date: 4 Oct 2013 12:28 am (UTC)If you're writing in one language and your characters speak an entirely different one-- say, you're writing in French and your characters speak Aramaic-- I'd go for equivalent effect where etymology is unobvious or utterly irrelevant.
Whether etymology is obvious or relevant is a subjective judgment. For me, if I'm writing about a fantasy world where everyone is totally blind, the characters will still see each other's points. On the other hand, if I'm writing about a fantasy world where mammals don't exist, it's probably raining snakes and lizards.
Unfortunately, there aren't necessarily sharp dividing lines between languages. Since it's a common one for fantasy writers, take the history of English as an example. There's no point in time that you can specify for which everything said after that point is comprehensible enough and everything said before that point is a different language. Most native English speakers would find, say, Jane Eyre comprehensible; most native English speakers would have difficulty with Shakespeare's idioms but get the gist of he plot (but that misses the point, since it's supposed to be funny and isn't about getting to the end!); most native English speakers would not understand Beowulf without studying the (foreign?) language in which it was written. At which point do you decide it's different enough to translate? Are all of those different enough to translate? Then what about the nineties? What about the various dialects of English?
On which topic, how do you translate a low-prestige dialect? That can be a plot point, but do you choose an existing low-prestige dialect? What if you speak only a high-prestige dialect? Should you make up a low-prestige dialect? Borrow the traits of the existing one in the other language?
In Not Without Laughter, Langston Hughes used dialect for dialogue, and standard American English for narration. I think that technique would have been less successful if the story had been written in the first person, or if the third-person narration had been much tighter. But in that case, the dialect is meant to be apparent, because it exists and has a right to exist. It's also a real-world dialect; would the same style work in elseworld fantasy?
IDK; I'm just rambling.