A little idea I have

A of fanfic where a person in the real world is transported into the world with of an anime series. Cliche, perhaps even overused, right. But how about this little twist: the person transported into the world is an English speaker with no knowledge of Japanese, but the world of the anime series is the "raw" version, so all the characters speak Japanese! I was figuring I'd make it take place in a series with some sort of life threatening scenario to make it that much harder for the person sent into the anime world.

Hmmmm.... maybe that "impossible pairing" pic featuring Saeko Busujima of Highschool of the Dead would be a good basis for this.

I was also thinking about using Google Translator so the lines of the anime/manga characters are actually written in Japanese, so the reader is as confused as the main character (with footnotes giving translations of course), although that might be a bit much.

Please give opinions.

If I'm the reader that did't know any Japanese. I won't read your fiction.

Bit of harsh word but it's true because the language barrier is a huge one.

emperor wrote:If I'm the reader that did't know any Japanese. I won't read your fiction.

Bit of harsh word but it's true because the language barrier is a huge one.

Okay, using Google translator to simulate the language barrier in the story is a bad idea. Even I don't know what I was smoking when I came up with that.

But what your thoughts about the concept itself, with just like

119's hypothetical story wrote:Character X said something in Japanese that Main Character didn't understand.

instead of abusing Google Translator to simulate the language barrier?

SPARTAN 119 wrote:I was also thinking about using Google Translator so the lines of the anime/manga characters are actually written in Japanese, so the reader is as confused as the main character (with footnotes giving translations of course), although that might be a bit much.

Bad idea - you'll just end up with a bunch of junk that sounds stupid to anyone who actually knows Japanese. The common practice amongst webcomic artists is to put the foreign text in angle brackets "<>". I suggest adopting the same practice. Also, if your characters can't communicate at all it will get boring fast, make sure they will have some way to communicate, even if not by speech. You may want to reference MegaTokyo as that is pretty much what the whole story started out as. Good luck with the writing.

Yeah, that's good advice. Use some method to denote when someone is speaking in another language (italics can also work, although I often use that for thoughts myself). If you don't want the reader to know what's being said, just make note of the character whose perspective you're writing from hearing something that he can't understand. (So when you want the reader to know more than the character, use the foreign speech indicator, if you want them just as in the dark, just say "so and so said something he couldn't understand").

A hell of a long time ago some friends of mine did something like that, except that anime characters started appearing in our world.