Any thoughts?

[super_tricie341]

Hi all! So I'm doing a podfic with bilingual characters. In the text, the author differentiated between which language was being spoken by using italics but I'm not sure how to make that clear in my reading. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Comments

[mific]

That sounds tricky - so the author has them speaking another language but renders the meaning of that bit of speech in italicized English? Hmmm. Can you quote a sample of the text so we can see what you mean? And say what the non-English language is?

[super_tricie341]

Yup, that's it exactly. The author is generally very good about telegraphing in the text what language (English vs Japanese) is being utilized in the dialogue, but there are exchanges where it's not so clear.

Annnnnnd I just found out as I was typing this comment that while I was waiting for the winter break to nail down this recording, someone else has already put out a podfic of it earlier this month. Alas. Maybe I'll sit on this recording for a while before putting out a repod.

I'd still welcome suggestions about how to differentiate between languages being spoken. I've had my eye on this story for podficcing, although there are three languages to deal with instead of two now.

[mific]

If that story was already podficced I guess you can see how the reader managed it.
But as far as I can see you either read it as ordinary English and lose the fact that they're speaking Japanese etc. , or you could use a special effect like reverb to mark the Japanese. I think that'd be weird though and make the Japanese seem like machine-speak or like it was on a radio.
Not everything can be podficced, basically: some things are better written. The only solution (and only for bilingual listeners) would be to translate and read the Japanese as actual Japanese. That'd be pretty cool.

[arwen_lune]

I wanted to suggest an effect too, but not reverb - just some subtle playing around in equalisation to make something sound a little more 'distant'. It's how I've set apart thoughts versus dialogue sometimes and I think it works well, and if you're subtle enough it doesn't really consciously register as an effect.

[piscaria]

Musical cues before each section might work. Pick one song to signify Language A and another to signify Language B.