My biggest problem in my book is character speech and sounds. It is primarily a travel book that focuses on several areas in the world such as India, Nepal, Malaysia etc etc. What I'm struggling to do is recreate the way people from these cultures spoke to the main character in their own pronunciation of English. I have no problem finding the required words when they speak in their own language but when they speak to the character in broken English I want it to be convincing. I am having particular problems with the area of Kashmir. I have actually emailed Kashmiri linguistic websites to gain some insight but thus far no response. I have in large parts done a Hemmingway and limited the conversation but this is not enough. Any suggestions....?
Also some people get the sentence structure the wrong way round. A bit like a Yoda thing. My friend often says things like "Wheres the toilet, can you tell me?" a silly example but thats what she understands. She gets her context mixed up too. All things are because she is translating her languague straight in to english. We can not do that in translation because of sentence structure and words meanings.
Jennifer - I mean when they speak in English, the sounds of words and phrases they say in English. For some people and places I didn't write down the way the people spoke to me in English and looking back it is hard to imagine how they spoke, especially the ones I met in Kashmir. All I really remember is that many words had a nasal pronunciation where as in Israel they spoke with a more guttural sound. I hope that clarifies what I mean.
Louise - Thanks. that is the route I've gone down especially with Indian characters in my story. In India they actually have a term for this. It is called Hinglish - a mix of Indian and English. However Kashmir is a melting pot of languages and dialects considering they speak several forms of Arabic and Hindi and also a now increasing blend of all languages to form what is known as Kashmiri. It is my fault for not recording this whilst I was there especially as I lived with a Muslim family for a month. It is definately the hardest part of my book thus far.
Could you clarify one thing? Do you mean that you write the dialogue in Nepali, Malay, Hindi etc when the characters speak in their own language? Or do you translate it?