Naava wrote:linguoboy wrote:Am I alone in this peeve or does it annoy some of y'all too?
That reminded me of this.
WTF is up with that clueless person trying to langsplain code-switching to a fluent bilingual? SMH.
As clumsy as this is, at least it's an attempt to reflect a multilingual reality. What really bugs me are passages where you'd have a conversation start like this between two characters who were Spanish-speakers and presumably speaking Spanish the whole time. Then it reads like, "They're speaking SPANISH, remember? 'Cause I set my story in MEXICO!"
I didn't think of the accent thing, because that's a film and television trope, not a literary one, but that's ridiculous, too. There'll be scenes where two characters are speaking with Russian accents or whatever and I'll be like, Aren't we in Russia? Isn't the whole dialogue presumably translated from Russian? If they have any accents at all, shouldn't they be reflective of their origins within Russia? (Like, say, a posh accent for an aristocrat or a regional accent to signal someone's from the provinces.)