Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
I was thinking just the other day about how Americans, for instance, will often throw in phrases like "pip pip, cheerio old chap" when imitating the British, and how incredibly stupid that must sound to the British.
|
Pfft. That even sounds stupid to me, and I'm American! That's why I work with people from other countries who are able to act as advisors to me, helping me with the little nuances of their respective local language, dialect or culture to make the dialog as convincing as possible. Sometimes I do take a few liberties in what I do since I'm writing to a mostly American audience, but for the most part I try to keep my dialog as authentic as possible. Or in cases where I'm not totally certain what a truly authentic speaker would say in a given time period, I either Google for clues, or just simply improvise.
Case in point, I've got character in a book series I'm working on who's British SAS, and still uses or displays many of his old British slang and mannerisms he had 40 years earlier when he arrived on the planet. But since he's been away from his nature culture for so long, much of his hard core "British-ness" has faded, and you instead see a man who has become a melting pot of words and mannerisms that he's picked up from the many other travelers he's meet along the way, even using a few "Americanisms" he's run across. Some might think that's wrong, but it's no different than taking someone from one culture and plopping him squarely into another. Over time he'll pick up a lot of cultural elements from the other society as well, making him somewhat of a social hybrid.