I'm working on a historical screenplay. Some characters will speak German. Do i write the dialog in German then subtitle it? Its important to the story to have German spoken.
Screenwriting : Dialogue in two languages? by Ann Burr
Dialogue in two languages?
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Good question. One technique is to write everything in English, but to identify, after the character's name and with parenthesis, the language the actor will speak. For example: FAY (In German) Is there another way?
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Fay's way is how I would do it... and have done it, even with the character speaking German!
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The studio reader does not speak or read German, so they won't understand what the heck is being said... and they'll dump it.
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Fay nailed it.
I just have to say Dialogue.
+1 to Fay
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Ann, I have read many scripts and all of them follow what Fay's said. All four of the Bourne scripts follows this for example.
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If you're writing a Hollywood spec script, do as both Fay and William suggested. If you're writing a shooting script, do as Alle suggested.
Nine...that's a huge number for a novice, just to get one completed is kicking my ass...if ur a genius I'd like to read those scripts.
I planned to type it in German and in parentheses type out in English.
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if based on english format, then type english with german subtitles unless to be played in germany first, then it would be english subtitles.
No I don't plan on using to much of mixing English and German. But it does help set the tone and scene.
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I'll defer to the experts (people who have sold scripts with these situations), but I'd do it this way (probably the wrong way, but that's what this is all about): HANS (in German) Why don't we speak in English. I need the practice. Is that okay with you, Fritz? (Attempt 3. This is NOT a format friendly site...maybe we should incorporate some of the Final Draft functionality. :^)
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For my bilingual movie's shooting script, where we had English and Portuguese actors who didn't speak the other language,I wrote both sets of dialogue out using the parallel dialogue format (sometimes used for phone conversations). This worked well and had the advantage of not increasing pagecount! For your pitch/sales/pre-production script I think it depends on your reader. Many comments above assume the reader will be in Hollywood, in which case stuck to all English with parentheses indicating language. However if your reader is bi-lingual, ie an exec in Germany, then I would suggest it's good to have the German dialogue on the page. Good luck!
Brilliant solution, Kristjan. I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering why they didn't think of that.