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Let's suppose you can only write in English, and characters speak 2 different languages. How do you put it into writing. Consider 3 different situations:

Person A speaks in language B, Person B responds in language B and then talks to Person C in language A.

Person A speaks in language B, Person B responds in language A so that Person A and Person C can understand.

Person A speaks in language A to Person C and then speaks in language B to person B.

You can add more situations, but let's assume you can only use English. How would you do it?

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    Possibly relevant: How to convey that the POV character does not understand what's said in dialogue? (Full disclosure: My own question.)
    – user
    Feb 8, 2019 at 18:17
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    As an aside, I see you accepted an answer quite early. It's your perogative whether, which, and when, to accept an answer, but you should be aware that questions with accepted answers often receive less attention from the community. Therefore, by accepting an answer early, you may be depriving yourself of even better answers. I usually suggest to wait a day or two before accepting an answer (to allow for people in different parts of the world to see, and answer, the question), except on the extremely high-traffic sites.
    – user
    Feb 8, 2019 at 18:21

1 Answer 1

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There are two easy ways to handle this, depending on whether you want the readers to understand what is being said, or not. In truth, whether you want the readers to understand or not is the only important factor. Which characters understand is irrelevant to how you write the dialogue.

  1. If the reader isn't supposed to understand what is being said, you'd go:

Alice said something in French to Bob, that Charlie couldn't understand. Whatever it was, it appeared to make Bob happy.

  1. If the reader is supposed to understand, you go:

Alice turned to Bob. "It's going to rain," she said in French. To Charlie, who spoke only German, she said "I've just told Bob that it's going to be a sunny day."

The key element is: if the reader is supposed to understand what is being said, you write it in English. If it is said in a language other than English, and this is not the normal state of affairs within the story, you inform the reader that the particular line of dialogue is not being said in English. (If the whole story takes place in France and involves French farmers, it is obvious all dialogue is in French - you don't need to be telling this.) If a character cannot understand what is being said, you state that.

If the reader is not supposed to understand what is being said, then it's "something", a noise. You can describe that noise (what it sounds like), but since the reader isn't supposed to understand, there's no actual line of dialogue.

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