Mryntu

I'm an amateur writer from the Philippines. I am writing a novelette for an international writing contest. My story is written in English, but is set here, in my country, with my POV character being a full blood Filipino. My question is, is it unnecessary to use my country's dialect as my characters' dialogue? should I just make it simple and just use English for their speech?

All of the conversation between the characters in the story is technically being said in my language. After all, English is not our main language. I myself think it is unnecessary to write the dialogue in our language, and then write the English translation afterwards. But I still did it anyway.

So am I doing it wrong after all? I need and expert's opinion about this. I feel like I should just write the dialogue in English, but I need an assurance if I really should. This is my first time writing a story. That's why I am a bit anxious about everything that I do.

You have read books like this, or at least are familiar with books like this:

Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls is set in Spain, and it is indicated, repeatedly, that the dialogue is in Spanish, in fact in a particular dialect of Spanish. The main character's accent is even discussed. But the dialogue is written entirely in English.

Romeo and Juliet is set in Italy. I doubt Shakespeare even knew a word of Italian. He certainly used none in the play.

And of course, there are translated novels - they are translated in their entirety, the dialogue is not kept in the source language.

Think of it like this: your audience speaks English. Perhaps only English. In such a case, anything in any language other than English is incomprehensible noise. If the alphabet you use is not the Latin one, it's not even noise - it's squashed spiders on the page, that make no sound in the reader's mind. Why would you want to fill pages upon pages with "noise" that means nothing to your reader?

You're confused because what the characters actually say is not in English. But that doesn't matter at all; your goal is not to transport to the readers what the characters "actually say", untouched. The characters don't "really" exist anyway. Your goal is to make your reader share the experience of saying and hearing those words. The experience includes understanding.

The only exception I know of to the above rule is Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace. That work was written in Russian and French, no translations provided (though those are always added in modern editions). The reason it was written like this is that the audience Tolstoy was writing for was all bilingual. Everyone who could possibly read the novel in the author's time spoke both Russian and French. Thus, the book might appear like an exception, but it supports the aforementioned logic.

Who is your audience? What languages do they know? If it's an international contest, are there language guidelines? If it says English Only, then be at least 99% English!

Are you planning on a few loanwords from Tagalog that are really hard to easily phrase in English? That sounds fine, especially if a reader can gather enough about them from context. (Example: perhaps a word describing a particular kind of flavor/texture that your grandmother's version of the dessert has, that this restaurant version does not have sufficiently.)

Often, if you're doing it to indicate private dialog, it may just be easier to use tags/description to state that.

"Jan and her father spoke quietly, in their native language, so no one else understood. They seemed to come to a decision."

or

"The parents talked. Jan heard a few words, like [whatever] and [whatever]. No matter how angry they were, when they spoke in [language], the language's [tonality? rhythms? some quality] sounded perfectly pleasant to outsiders."

If you are writing for an English speaking audience, I would assume you would be writing in English?

I've seen some examples in stories where the author writes the dialogue primarily in English but uses certain phrases written in the native language of the character with footnotes of an approximate translation of the phrase. That could help you give your story some individuality while keeping it available to an English-speaking audience.

In general, if writing for an English speaking audience, the dialog should be in English. A few short passages in another language, with a translation or at least a summery in English can work, but often it is better to simply describe the characters speaking in a different language. If the other language is one which a significant fraction of your audience might be able to at least puzzle out a few words, including it may give some flavor.

It is not uncommon when a character's native language is different from that of the rest of the cast, to lightly sprinkle dialog with words from that character's native language, particularly exclamations, where the exact sense is not vital to understanding of the story. Early Agatha Christie had the character Hercule Poirot exclaiming "Mon Dieu" or 'Sacre Bleu" or the like every few pages, and even that was probably too much.

I recall one early Peter Whimsy story (by Sayers) "The Entertainign Episode of the Article in Question" which included about three or four pages of untranslated dialog in French, overheard by the viewpoint character. This turned out to include the vital clue -- an error in French grammar which revealed that a character was actually a male disguised as a female. Apparently Sayers expected most of her audience to have learned enough French that this would work for them. I wouldn't advise such a passage in a current English-language story.