Multiple languages in a screenplay

[boarderjosh10]

How do I go about writing in an additional language into a script. Basically my whole script is in English, but then there is a scene where two characters have a conversation in Hebrew. Should I write in Hebrew text or should I write the conversation in English and then say somewhere "in Hebrew"? Is there a standard for this?

thanks

 

[Bob Gruen]

I think this was handled very cleverly in The Hunt for Red October. One of the Russian characters was speaking in Russian, dialog that was not important, and the camera dollied in tight onto his mouth. The dialog went from Russian to English with a heavy Russian accent, and the real dialog started at that point. The camera then dollied back to it's starting position. Half the movie took place on the Russian sub, so a convention like this was needed.

If you asking about subtitles for regular viewing, then write it in English. If you are writing for the hearing impaired (closed captioning) then you would add "in Hebrew" if it were an important story element.

Bob

 

[ZeroContent]

Write it in English and mention they're speaking in whatever language. Obviously if someone is reading a script you can't have it in a language someone doesn't know.

 

[pmark23]

I have a feature screenplay in production with three languages. For just one or two lines I used "(IN RUSSIAN)" (or whatever the language was). And if it was an entire scene or several continuous scenes I would add a note something like "ALL DIALOGUE IN RUSSIAN" and then "DIALOGUE REVERTS TO ENGLISH".

After umpteen million people reading it, nobody said anything, and it's very clear which parts are in which language.

 

[dougspice]

pmark has it about right. There's no 100% rule on how this stuff should be handled, so do what seems to work. Recently I've been working on scripts that involve an interpreter going back and forth from Arabic. Sometimes the person he's translating speaks in Arabic, sometimes in English, and sometimes the interpreter gets the translation wrong, so it was important to make those parts clear in the script, but generally you just have to do what feels right.