I gots a question

[saerwen_13]

So, let's say you're writing a story that takes place in another country that has its own language and its own slang, but are writing this story in your own language, which has its own slang. How do you deal with the issue of slang in the story? Do you use the version (or the closest approximate) from the other language, or just use your own?

Comments

[byakuya_chan]

...you mean to tell me you've never written a story that takes place in another country?

You stick with your own; you don't have a choice. You could never spend enough time trying to learn the slang of another country; even born into a certain culture, you never learn everything about it.

[saerwen_13]

I actually have, but I always stuck with the default of using slang that was all mine. I haven't written stories set in Japan, though, and I already know a certain amount of the language. It sounds totally natural for me to see someone cursing in Japanese, frex, in a story, whereas it might not seem as natural if I was reading a story set in Portugal and somebody started cursing in Portuguese.

But you can too use another country's slang, to a certain extent. Exclamations like "Shimatta!", "Merde!", etc work, and readers can usually tell from the context what you meant; however, I've noticed that if you're not careful about the way you do this, it's really easy for your writing just to become annoying. I remember reading this one story set in Japan where the author put entire sentences in Japanese with asterisks at the end so that you'd know you could go to the bottom to find what those sentences meant; they were accurate, but utterly killed the tension in the scene. Even worse is when the author puts in a parenthesis with the