troisroyaumes: Painting of a duck, with the hanzi for "summer" in the top left (Default)
Tari ([personal profile] troisroyaumes) wrote in [community profile] forkedtongues 2010-07-26 02:24 am (UTC)

I definitely have this problem for Korean language fandoms, and it's the main reason why I can't read a lot of fic for K-dramas or K-pop RPF.

I'm fortunate in that after a lifetime of translating for my parents, it doesn't take much mental effort to translate Korean to English. (Whether that translation is accurate or really captures voice and nuance is a different question.) It's the facility I rely on when I do write dialogue in fic for Korean fandoms; I almost always think of what they'll say in Korean first and translate to English in my head as I write. It's tough though, and it's telling that a lot of my fics for Korean fandoms don't rely so much on dialogue as my other fics do. I suspect the English sounds a bit more stilted as well.

In one fic for an anime fandom that had Korean characters, I included lines involving wordplay in Korean. I ended up providing the English translation (which lost the wordplay) and providing a footnote with the original Korean and an explanation of what I intended.

One of these days, I would like to write bilingual fic, although admittedly, it would reduce my audience. I did submit bilingual original fic for a high school English class once, and I ended up translating everything for the benefit of my teacher. Not sure if I want to invest that much effort in making the fic accessible to an English-language audience though.

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