two questions of word choice

[swan_tower]

I have two questions to put to you, my faithful readers, regarding Midnight Never Come. Both are issues of word choice, but on a broad scale.

[Poll #1010219]

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmm. And tybalt_quin is annoyed by translating thereafter -- does everybody in this book speak good French? If there's the very very occasional bit where French Character has to get a word from Francophone Character in order for Exclusively Anglophone Character to get what's going on, that might not be as annoying to him/her -- but it might.

Or if the English-speaker had to suggest a word, but again, that could get annoying fast.

The obvious thing is swearing -- a lot of people swear in their native tongue. But having French people running around going "Mon Dieu!" and "Merde!" all the time is annoying, too, so if you do that, please switch up the swearing a little bit.

I'm not always this obsessed with swearing. Just this week, apparently.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It's a chilly little political scene, so no swearing.

There's only two characters in the conversation: the Frenchwoman (speaking English) and Lune, who like any self-respecting Tudor courtier speaks French. I want the reminders of Frenchness to come often enough to stick in the reader's head, so suggesting English words when Madame Mari falters would be too obtrusive.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmm, and using words that are not very translatable into English might be both confusing and obtrusive.

Elephino.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I've only had three people in the poll say they don't like it, so as long as I keep it sporadic (and I think I'm using four French words in a two-thousand-word scene, not counting Lune addressing Mari as "madame ambassadrice"), it will hopefully be okay.