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Chapter 1 is One Percent Mexican-Spanish - Footnotes , Glossary or Both?

Legendary Sidekick

The HAM'ster
Moderator
When I read Gary Soto's work, he does both. That is, he translates Spanish words (sometimes contextually, especially in the case of swears and slangs) at the bottom of the page, and he also has a glossary in the back of the book. (That might be the publisher that did that, and not Soto, but you get the idea.)

On Google Docs, footnotes have to be numbered (or so it seems), which I kind of hate. I'd rather just put the words in bold and not have a number. The footnote itself has the Spanish word/phrase in bold. I suppose on an e-reader, you can click the words for definitions. Unless that's something that automatically happens when you use the Insert Footnote feature in MS Word and such, explaining how to set that up may be wasted on me.

I guess my questions are:
  1. Would footnotes for Spanish translation break immersion?
  2. Would it matter whether you're led to the footnote with a tiny number or bold/italic text?

If frequency matters, there are 13 footnotes in the first chapter, which is 1500+ words. 6 of the footnotes are on page 1 (the first 300+ words). I anticipate very few new Spanish words as the story goes along, and the story might be more like half-a-percent Spanish or less by the end.

I teach mostly Hispanic students, so I'm exposed to enough Spanglish to see that Soto's characters and my students (an even some Hispanic colleagues) have strikingly similar speech patterns. So I'm not a Spanish-speaker myself, but the word choice is more educated than if I were to attempt Chinglish (which I'd fail at despite having a Chinese wife).

I was going to do without the semi-bilingualness, but the story takes place on Earth and the character is Mexican-American. In a fantasy world, I'd just say "common tongue: problem solved," but in a story that takes place on Earth, I feel like it's a cop-out for me to take the linguistics out of the MC's ethnicity.
 

FarmerBrown

Troubadour
I think the usual method is to italicize 'foreign' words and have a glossary in the back. Unless entire sentences are in Spanish, in which case you should probably go with footnotes. It might be best to provide as much context as you can within the story so readers with NO Spanish won't get as frustrated.

Footnotes do NOT translate to ebook format and you shouldn't have them at all in your file when converting to an ebook. If you want to add pop-up content like definitions, you'd need to run your file through an ebook enhancer, like Beneath the Ink. That's where having a glossary is handy instead of footnotes, you won't need to mess with that! Good luck ;-)
 

Legendary Sidekick

The HAM'ster
Moderator
Yeah, that's right. Soto also had Spanish italicized with a glossary. And come to think of it, it was only some English words that were in bold and translated at the bottom of the page. The version I'm thinking of is for ESL students.

I'm following Soto's lead, keeping enough context so lack of Spanish adds a hint of ethnic flavoring, and applying in moderation so it (hopefully) won't break immersion. Less than Soto, since he's Mexican and I am not. Just my main character is.
 
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