• Wondering which camera, gear, computer, or software to buy? Ask in our Gear Guide.

Translation in dialogue

Hi there. I'm busy with a screenplay in which I would like to include my hoe language Afrikaans in dialogue. However I decided to write the action and descriptions in English, now I'm struggling to decide how to write the dialogue this is what I came up with. Please help me out in terms of what would be best for format reasons.


Darkness... we hear the voice of an old woman, OUMA.

Ouma

A story I heard when I was little. ("'n Storie wat ek kleintyd al gehoor het")
 
OUMA
A story I heard when I was little.
("'n Storie wat ek kleintyd al gehoor het")

I suppose the Africaans vanishes when you get used to it and only wants to read English and you'll find Africaans easily, if you want that.

Or like this?

OUMA
A story I heard when I was little.
(("'n Storie wat ek kleintyd al gehoor het"))
 
Afrikaans

The actors will be speaking Afrikaans mostly, well the main character is - but I am aiming it at an Afrikaans audience, but only thing is though my examiner plus the people who I will be pitching the script to cannot read Afrikaans/its not their mother tongue - so it IS important that I have the Afrikaans included, it is kinda the core of the story, the accents, the dialects and so
 
Is there a hybrid between Afrikaans and English? Like Spanglish? Something that's mostly understandable by an English speaker, but preserves the rhythms, words and cultural connotations of Afrikaans.

I'd use some of the grammatical structures of Afrikaans and some of it's words that can be easily deduced by an English speaker where possible. Where it's essential that it be in pure Afrikaans, your example above looks reasonable . Parentheses and/or italics is sensible.
 
Last edited:
And check with the examiner what she or he prefers. Show your suggestion and get it approved to be certain. Don't forget that it increases the page numbers.
 
Thanks for the advice, I think I will just leave it to the examiner to 'examine', only thing though he is not in the industry, quite a pure academic, so I'm just a bit scared he doesn't know that much about the industry preferences in television formats. I'll keep asking though.
 
Back
Top