Some languages in the story and Afterimage 13-15

Ais here, with further thoughts on language. I know I'm pretty much a one-track minded person sometimes with the topics I repeatedly bring up, but whatever.

Languages are extremely interesting to me, as are cultures. We always try to include as many accurate details as possible when writing the story but I tend to get wrapped up in it and always want to know a little more, be a little more detailed.

So, chapter 15 was one of the first places where I really whipped out the Spanish skillz to try to at least somewhat make some believable conversations. But it drives me nuts when I can't quite translate things correctly. I tried to use a combination of Venezuelan and other Spanish slang along with the proper forms (Venezuela's one of the few places that uses the vosotros form, which Boyd doesn't know because he basically learned Spanish from immersion in Mexico-- hence his "what the hell are they saying??" response). Yet it's always frustrating to try to get the correct level of casualness, etc.

Like, I don't usually speak in complete sentences and I also use a lot of contractions and so on (don't instead of do not, gonna instead of going to, etc). But some of the conversation had to be in complete sentences because I'm still not fluent enough to know which words to drop to make it sound naturally native.

At least I have enough understanding of Spanish to be able to do different tenses ("I have found the bodies" rather than "I found" or "I find") but the other languages I'm acquainted with? Ha. Not a chance.

I barely know any French although I can read/understand it decently due to my knowledge of Spanish, I hardly remember much Japanese and pretty much lose at recognizing any kanji anymore, and I'm just starting Russian but so far I can basically say "My name is __" and that's it. We're only just learning the Cyrillic alphabet.

Point being, this sucks, because Boyd knows French so I want him to sound fluent, but since I'm not fluent it makes this difficult. Hence me hitting people up for help with cultures/languages btw, although I also try to utilize other stuff like babelfish and triple check things back and forth to make sure it's not some really random translation. And even then I bet it sounds awkward.

I was thinking about how we use language in the story, though. For instance, it worked well enough for all that chattering in Spanish with Boyd trying to translate, but later in the chapter we had to resort to our typical "Blahblah," so-and-so said in __xx__ language.

We don't do that because we're too lazy to translate (although it's probably best we don't try since some languages we just aren't fluent in) but rather because some things need to be understood by the audience. And since the story is in English, the audience is too, even though most of you could kick my ass in fluency of multiple languages, and many readers aren't even native English speakers in the first place. (Major points for reading such a long story in English, by the way, to those of you who aren't as good at English.)

Anyway, if this were a movie, there would be English subtitles for parts where they're speaking another language but it's important info. Since we can't do subtitles, this works as a substitute. The perfectionist in me finds it a little sad but the realist in me knows this is the best way for us to write the scenes without getting so sidetracked we never finish.

Incidentally, I code the languages so they should be properly read by audio programs or the browsers as the correct language it is. Hopefully that works if anyone views the site in a manner where that would be useful.

Blah. There was some other shit I was going to ramble about but I quite suddenly got tired so TOO BAD. Although I doubt anyone is lamenting a few less paragraphs of my wordiness ;P