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lol dat game............
Meanwhile, in Marchand/Pastrnak news:
ping pong all night long oh yea is that what the kids are calling it these days. Don't worry, Brad's gonna give it to him a lot more frequently now amirite ladiez
On another note, sports fandom has gotten me thinking again about how to write stories where the characters have language barriers. What's the best way to do that? In SPN fandom, I dealt with it a few times by racebending characters into Indonesians, specifically Sundanese Indonesians because that's the cadence I'm most familiar with. (BANDUNG REPRESENT.) But like, take baseball - I don't know Japanese or Spanish. Hockey, I don't know Russian or any of the northern and eastern European languages. I don't really know how to do the broken English in fic and be confident that I can pull it off.
I was thinking, then, maybe write a fic from say David Pastrnak's POV and narrate his thoughts and try to cheat around dialogue. English is not my first language either, but it's become the language I'm most comfortable in, whereas my grasp of Indonesian kinda stalled at around the age I was when my family emigrated. I know there's an English-language novel out there about a POC family in which when they're speaking in their native language, the dialogue is still written in English with us understanding it's not, but when other people are speaking in English, their dialogue is italicized, and maybe not in quotations, or something? There has to be a way I can do this without learning Japanese/Spanish/Czech/Finnish/Russian/Swedish.
I'm fascinated by the intersections though. I have this scene I want to work into baseball fic at some point where Christian Vazquez is, like, idk, eating a sandwich while Xander Bogaerts is nattering away on the phone next to him. Vazquez and Bogaerts, BFFs extraordinaire, usually talk to each other in Spanish, but Bogaerts is on the phone with his brother and they're talking in Papiamento. Vazquez doesn't know Papiamento, but he recognizes some words simply because he's been hanging around Bogaerts for so long. Stuff like that. But I'd be writing all this in English 'cos that's the language I know, so how do I balance that!
Like check out Ichiro Suzuki and Munenori Kawasaki, who have picked up the obscene variety of Spanish from their teammates. Another thing I want is a scene where Koji Uehara, David Ortiz, and Mike Napoli are hanging out shit-faced enough that Koji speaks Japanese more often than not, and Ortiz speaks Spanish more often than not, and Nap's just blabbering along in English, and they all get along merrily and understand each other just enough in this grand adventure. basball frans
ping pong all night long oh yea is that what the kids are calling it these days. Don't worry, Brad's gonna give it to him a lot more frequently now amirite ladiez
On another note, sports fandom has gotten me thinking again about how to write stories where the characters have language barriers. What's the best way to do that? In SPN fandom, I dealt with it a few times by racebending characters into Indonesians, specifically Sundanese Indonesians because that's the cadence I'm most familiar with. (BANDUNG REPRESENT.) But like, take baseball - I don't know Japanese or Spanish. Hockey, I don't know Russian or any of the northern and eastern European languages. I don't really know how to do the broken English in fic and be confident that I can pull it off.
I was thinking, then, maybe write a fic from say David Pastrnak's POV and narrate his thoughts and try to cheat around dialogue. English is not my first language either, but it's become the language I'm most comfortable in, whereas my grasp of Indonesian kinda stalled at around the age I was when my family emigrated. I know there's an English-language novel out there about a POC family in which when they're speaking in their native language, the dialogue is still written in English with us understanding it's not, but when other people are speaking in English, their dialogue is italicized, and maybe not in quotations, or something? There has to be a way I can do this without learning Japanese/Spanish/Czech/Finnish/Russian/Swedish.
I'm fascinated by the intersections though. I have this scene I want to work into baseball fic at some point where Christian Vazquez is, like, idk, eating a sandwich while Xander Bogaerts is nattering away on the phone next to him. Vazquez and Bogaerts, BFFs extraordinaire, usually talk to each other in Spanish, but Bogaerts is on the phone with his brother and they're talking in Papiamento. Vazquez doesn't know Papiamento, but he recognizes some words simply because he's been hanging around Bogaerts for so long. Stuff like that. But I'd be writing all this in English 'cos that's the language I know, so how do I balance that!
Like check out Ichiro Suzuki and Munenori Kawasaki, who have picked up the obscene variety of Spanish from their teammates. Another thing I want is a scene where Koji Uehara, David Ortiz, and Mike Napoli are hanging out shit-faced enough that Koji speaks Japanese more often than not, and Ortiz speaks Spanish more often than not, and Nap's just blabbering along in English, and they all get along merrily and understand each other just enough in this grand adventure. basball frans
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It occurs to me that also if the characters don't even notice how they're switching between languages, it's going to have to be someone else that notices - a monolingual POV character, or just someone telling them to stick to one language at a time. Something like that. Make the reader realize at the same time the character does, you know?
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Hmm, that also reminds me, another thing I find interesting is when someone speaks two languages not as strongly as their native tongue. When I was working in Manila, there was this American colleague who flew in from Indonesia, she had a functional knowledge of Indonesian and was learning Tagalog. But she would often end up speaking in Indonesian when she meant to speak in Tagalog because it's the same part of her brain trying to do this thing and habit makes her fall back on what she was more familiar with. That's another thing I want to play around with in fic, I think.
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(Factoid from psychology: we store second-language vocabulary in a different part of our brains than first-language vocabulary. So it sort of makes sense to me that the vocab from the different second languages would get mixed up.)
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