minor character

linguoboy · Postby **linguoboy** » 2019-10-21, 21:43

Nebenfigur

bijfiguur

Postby **Dormouse559** » 2019-10-22, 0:32

Adding French. Nothing surprising.

Nebenfigur

bijfiguur

personnage secondaire

Linguaphile · Postby **Linguaphile** » 2019-10-22, 0:56

biperson

Nebenfigur

minor character

bijfiguur

biperson

biroll

personaje secundario

personnage secondaire

второстепенный персонаж

kõrvaltegelane

sivuhenkilö

ตัวละครรอง

linguoboy · Postby **linguoboy** » 2019-10-22, 21:57

Linguaphile wrote: personaje secundario
personnage secondaire

I was wondering about these translations. In trying to research the term, I came across this article in French which presents a fourfold division into:

Le personnage principal
Le personnage important
Le personnage secondaire
Le personnage figurant

It seems to me that the first two might correspond to two types of "major characters" and the last two into two types of "minor characters", but I'm not really sure.

Linguaphile · Postby **Linguaphile** » 2019-10-23, 0:16

linguoboy wrote:
Linguaphile wrote: personaje secundario
personnage secondaire

I was wondering about these translations. In trying to research the term, I came across this article in French which presents a fourfold division into:
Le personnage principal
Le personnage important
Le personnage secondaire
Le personnage figurant
It seems to me that the first two might correspond to two types of "major characters" and the last two into two types of "minor characters", but I'm not really sure.

Personaje figurante (or just figurante on its own) is used for a very small role in television or movies (an "extra" or "bit part" in English). For some reason I initially thought your request for translations was about literature. Figurante is mainly only used for television/film. I suppose that's because their rolls are so small that you only see them in the background, in a way that wouldn't even be worth mentioning in literature (in literature they'd simply be described as "someone" or "a crowd" or whatever). If you want translations for that too, then in Estonian, Swedish, and Norwegian those bit parts or extras are called statist (and in German, Statist).
In Spanish you can also call a minor character personaje menor. Personajes secundarios is the term that was used in literature courses I took, though. (Along the same lines, "supporting actors" are actores secundarios.)

Edit: fun fact - the use of figurante and figurant in the Romance languages and the use of figuur and Figur in the Germanic ones is somewhat coincidental here. They're cognates if you go back to Latin roots, of course, but in the Romance languages the meaning being used here is an adjective describing a particular type of character as "appearing, listed" (cf. Spanish figurar) while in the Germanic languages the meaning being used is the noun meaning "person, character". In other words, figurante/figurante are the word used here for minor in the phrase "minor character" (but a bit more specific) while figuur/Figur are the translations of the word character. Funny coincidence!