Russian Dialogue Questions

Do you mean writing cyrillic? As in, ФВГНтоаг? Or do you mean dealing with grammar and such?

Don't make a meal of it.

If the intended readers are English speaking, and they know the story takes place in Russia, write the dialogue in English.

Bufty said:

Don't make a meal of it.

If the intended readers are English speaking, and they know the story takes place in Russia, write the dialogue in English.

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I'm going to add on to this.

Though I feel writing in another language has plenty of advantages, I would strongly recommend against it if you don't actually know the language. For example, you can Google Translate all you want but just because it's translated doesn't mean it's in a way that Russians will actually understand what the heck you are saying. For all you know, russians may look at that and laugh at the poor quality or get offended for whatever reason. The same goes for if you learn it out of a book or let someone else translate the language. Just because somebody translates your text in their language doesn't mean they're doing so in a manner that will help you in the long run.

I'm going to move this to Roundtable where you're likely more responses.

I should mention too that on a game dev forum a japanese man with no knowledge of english used google translate to help him out in asking questions to a group of english speakers. Nobody (I was one of the people) was able to understand what he was asking as a result. After a couple days of no progress someone else more experienced then him spoke in his language and solved the issue.

It's hard to give advice unless we know more about the intended audience. You make it sound like this whole story is not in Russian, so I'm wondering why she wants to put the dialogue in Russian. Does she speak Russian? Do you?

There are many Russian writers out there. They aren't difficult to find online, and many of them need help with English. Your friends helps one of them, and he helps her.

cnl790 said:

My friend was getting cyrillic and she wasn't sure if that was the only way to write it. I don't think she was worried to much about the text rather than the grammar.

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What do you mean by "getting Cyrillic?" Cyrillic is an alphabet; it's what you use to write Russian. But if the intended audience doesn't speak Russian, and the author doesn't either, I'd stay far away from using actual Russian language passages. And Google Translate. All you'll get is unintentional comedy.

ETA: What asroc said...

If she really must use Russian dialogue, then I'd advise learning how to transliterate it rather than having Cyrillic as an additional barrier between the non-Russianist reader and the text.

But I'd honestly advise against it. The thing is, people who can read Russian might be irritated/alienated/amused/all three if it's bad Russian; and people who don't have no way to relate to it. You can't puzzle out Russian words if you don't at least have another Slavic language. Even then, I tend to think including more than the absolute bare necessary minimum of foreign language words isn't really a good idea (it doesn't work for me, anyway, and I'm multilingual).

I still remember the Big-Six-published commercial novel I read that had huge swathes of nonsensical Spanish. It was recognisably meant to be *something*, and I ended up sitting and puzzling it out backwards to figure out what was meant to be said. It was quite funny, actually -- things like "la momia" (Egyptian mummy) for "mummy" (as in mother), and "Caramelo de buenos días!" which was clearly the Google translate for "Good morning, sweetie." But it didn't exactly work as the author intended...

What folks here are saying. Write it in English, but consider using the occasional Russian word where it fits the rhythm. Russian has some great words that just don't translate well in English. Depending on how she uses these, they could be understandable in context or warrant a quickie explanation within the text.

And in most cases, I'd use roman script approximation (our alphabet). There might be occasions where it makes sense to write in Cyrillic (character comes to an interesting sign, for example). But if she does that, she should limit herself to a line or two and translate it promptly into English.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a good uniform transliteration system between Russian and English. (Mandarin, for example, has pinyin, which is easy to render. But I've never seen the Russian equivalent.)

My advice to friend: Just write it in English, throwing in the occasional chyort and svoloch for spice. Quite good enough. If it's genre fiction. If it's a high lit epic like War and Peace where half the first chapter is in French--then hats off and get a real Russian, hahaha