Mixing in bits of other languages
I’m writing a script at the moment which at various points throughout requires characters to speak in different languages other than English. I was just wondering if there is a strict code for writing small moments of French or Italian in an English speaking script?
For example, do I write the foreign language as a regular piece of dialogue underneath the character name in block capitals as normal and write the English in brackets underneath? Or do I write the dialogue in English and indicate in the stage directions it should be spoken in Italian or whatever?
– Garreth
London, England
There are no hard-and-fast rules. My best advice is that if the word or phrase is short, and easily understandable in context, use the foreign language. So, the Frenchman says, “Bonjour.”
If it’s serious dialogue you’re talking about, put it in English. Here’s a few snippets from the Ops pilot Jordan Mechner and I wrote, which shows a few ways of doing it.
- INT. KIDNAP SHACK - NIGHT
- A corrugated-metal shack. We don’t see much of it. A terrified Dagny is flanked by TWO KIDNAPPERS. Their leader (the Voice) passes the phone to Dagny.
- DAGNY
- Papa? Papa!
- (fast stream of Norwegian)
- Give them what they want, please get me out of here, I’m scared! Papa!
- MCGINTY
- Don’t see any soldiers. Shouldn’t there have been, like, a checkpoint coming into town?
- He catches an uneasy glance from Hareth. This is not good. Spotting an OLD MAN in the street –
- MCGINTY (IN ARABIC) (CONT’D)
- Hospital! Where is hospital?
- The old man scurries inside.
- MCGINTY (CONT’D)
- Friendly.
- Suddenly the PASSENGER DOOR OPENS —
- On edge, Vanowen and Hareth turn with their WEAPONS —
- But it’s just an IRAQI KID who’s hopped into the Humvee with them.
- IRAQI KID (IN ARABIC)
- Hospital! Go straight, I take you!
As you can see, we didn’t always format things the same way. In this case, I think consistency is less important than clarity.
If a significant chunk of your dialogue is going to be in a specific non-English language — for instance, if an entire scene is two characters speaking in Farsi — save your readers some bother and drop the “(in Farsi, subtitled)” parentheticals. Just say it’s in Farsi in the scene description. It’s your choice whether to leave it in italics.
Articles
July 27th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
In the published/shooting script for Terminator 2, the Spanish dialogue was followed by an English translation, meaning you had to read the same line twice, destroying the pace of the dialogue (while showing off that Cameron or Wisher can speak Spanish).
My danger is I’d probably get a bad translation off Sherlock or that Dashboard Widget and come off like Inspector Clouseau.
August 1st, 2006 at 6:48 am
I have written a script where some characters speak in Dutch. The first instance of Dutch dialogue is written in bold highlighting with the parenthetical that all dialogue in the full text, when written in bold highlighting, is to be enacted in Dutch with English subtitles.
August 3rd, 2006 at 8:47 am
Thanks for the insight. I was wondering about that myself…
August 17th, 2006 at 11:33 pm
I was thinking about this recently myself hen I was writing, despite the fact that I asked your advice on this back in 2001 at IMDb… Always nice to have examples, though. ^_^
August 24th, 2006 at 11:23 am
Recently I wrote dialogue for a pair of German boys. Due to the fact that they were in Germany, members of the Hitler Youth, and described as German boys I simply wrote their words in English with “subtitles” in parantheses beneath the name of the first speaker. All who have read it understood what I was trying to do.
In a subsequent draft, I assumed that the film, if made, would be for an American audience in which case I omitted any reference to the language and decided that, if it wasn’t crucial to the story (a character is outed as a spy after being overheard speaking in their native toungue, for example) it wasn’t necessary to point out what language the actors would be speaking.
October 31st, 2006 at 12:32 pm
Hi, thanks for the example… I would like to include a couple of words in Hindi (Indian language) into the English dialogue. Not as easy to understand as Bonjour… so I’m not sure exactly how to approach it.
INDIAN WOMAN
That’s very thoughtful of you, beta (child)!
CHILD
Nani-ji (Grandma), you’re welcome.
Any advice?
Cheers,
Neesha
December 7th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
I’m writing a character who quotes ancient Greek. Since she’s doing it to show off her smarts by leaving the other characters clueless, I’m just writing the Greek out phonetically. They can’t understand her, why should we be able to?
Unless you want the words subtitled (or otherwise translated on the screen), why give translations in the script? If the old professor asks “Alte freunde, wo bist du?” and it’s not subtitled, the audience won’t have any idea what he’s saying. Why translate it for the reader, giving them knowledge the audience will never have?
February 12th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
I’m writing a few exchanges that take place in Spanish, but there are important aspects of the DIALECT (it’s Venezuelan, not Mexican Spanish) that are important, and I can’t be sure that the translators in California will know or care how to make the translation accuratly.
So I’m putting the dialog in the Venezuelan dialect, with the translation in brackets. It may or may not be “the best” way, but I’ve decided that the subtle nuances of the original dialect are too important for me to take the chance of having it acted out by Mexican actors.
May 30th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
I should read Shaobo Qin’s pages in Ocean’s 11/12/13 - I’d love to think that they just write it in Mandarin and leave the actors guessing.
August 21st, 2007 at 8:01 pm
I’m not a screenwriter, but I would recommend describing what the character says, rather than writing the literal English. ie. “IRAQI KID offers to direct them to the hospital, in Arabic”. This will reduce the risk that the translator will do a literal translation, giving unnatural Arabic which will throw suspension of disbelief right out of the window for any viewers who understand the language.
There’s a Japanese kid on “American Dad” who shows this phenomenon a lot. Everything he says is correct, colloquial Japanese–and almost none of it would ever be used by a real Japanese person.
If you’ve got an entire conversation taking place in a foreign language, I would initially just write a summary of the contents of the conversation in English, and then afterwards work with a screenwriter who is a native speaker to create the actual dialog, and then finally translate it back into English. The reason is that the whole flow of conversation, the pattern and rhythm of back-and-forth, differs between languages.
This assumes you actually care about people who understand the foreign language. If you just want to do it to sound cool, then whatever.