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Formatting Dialogue In A Foreign Language
There will be occasions in a script where you might have a character who speaks in a foreign tongue. For example you may have a French waiter mutter something under his breath, in his own language, under his tongue. It doesn’t matter if you can’t speak French yourself or are a regular Gerard Depardieu because writing script dialogue in a foreign language is as easy as pie. Put simply you should not write dialogue in a foreign language.
Since the person eventually reading your script will probably not be French and may not speak the language, they still need to be able to understand what is going on.
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To add a flavor of the foreign language you could sprinkle in a few French words amongst the dialogue like so:
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If you positively have to have a character speak a foreign language in a realistic way then you have a number of options.
1. If it doesn’t matter or not whether the audience understand the language spoken by the character or you feel the audience will understand what is going on then you can write out the dialogue in the relevant foreign language. If you yourself can’t speak that language then you can use the wryly/parenthesis to let the reader know what language should be spoken and then write in English, like the first example above.
2. If a character is going to speak a foreign language through a whole scene or even the full movie then you can note it in the narrative description when the character is introduced. This way you can write in English and leave it for someone else to translate later on in the movie making process.
There’s a problem with both these methods though. While these are easy to both read and write they aren’t going to be easy to understand to anyone watching the movie unless they actually speak that foreign language. The answer to this problem is to include subtitles in English.
3. Like the second option you can make note in the narrative description that the character speaks a foreign language which is subtitled in English. It should looks something like this:
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You can write a full scene in a foreign language with a similar note and a second note when the subtitles end.
4. You can also use the wryly/parenthesis to note that the dialogue is in a foreign language and subtitles in English.
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5. This is the last option for subtitling. Use his option if the sound of the words in the foreign language is important, in this example the sound of the language has an amusing quality.
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Whenever possible though you should try to use English as much as possible. Subtitles and foreign languages can distract from the action on screen. You can always give a sense of a foreign language by mixing in a few foreign words with a hint of the relevant accent.