Hey, guys.
As some of you know, I am multilingual (Italian is my first language), and so, I tend to write stories featuring international casts of characters, each of whom speak their own language at one point or another. I'm curious to know other people's opinions on how they cope with writing such characters and how they handle the non-English dialogue (I typically write foreign-language dialogue in a different colour unique to each character - red for Japanese, green for Italian, blue for Russian, etc.) with a notice preceding it (for the first time only - second time onwards, I assume the reader will understand it's not meant to be spoken in English).
S. P.
Interesting approach. So far I've been putting in parentheticals the language they are speaking in. But I'm not sure if that is the best way to approach it.
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Company people print scripts to read & pass around. What if they don't have a color printer?
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Put it in a parathetical i’.e (in Spanished, subtitled) If it’s consistent put a note in general text in parenthesis i.e. (Jose’s dialogue will be spoken in Spanish and subtitled unless noted.) That’s from Trottier and i listen to him
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The color thing is going to be a distraction. Don't do formatting tricks that take people out of the story.
That being said.... If the language isn't absolutely necessary to be understood, then you can put it in the speaker's original language with no subtitles. This would work with, as an example, two native speakers having a side conversation where we don't need to understand the debate, but then they turn to the non-native speaker and deliver the result of the conversation in whatever the main language is in the script. Another example would be interjections, they can be in native language without subtitles.
IF the information that is being delivered in a native language is important for the reader and the audience to know then you have two choices: English dialogue with the parenthetical (Spanish), as an example, or dialogue in native language with parenthetical (subtitles). If the whole scene is in a native language with subtitles, put in the description at the beginning of the scene (in [language] with subtitles), so you don't have to repeat that with every piece of dialogue.
If you choose to use native language with subtitles, you'll need to figure out a way to insert the meaning in the script for the reader without it being clunky...
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Pick up a copy of "The Screenwriter's Bible" by David Trottier. This book handles almost every type of formatting issue out there.
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A great free online resource is screenwriting.io. I think it's a creation of John August's. It has nearly every conceivable formatting situation covered and I've never seen anyone disagree with the answers promulgated there.
IDK.
Globalized screenplays sell.
Can't be half assers in logic though.
Structure needs to be seamless,... not guided.