OTW
I was just about to post the graphic celebrating AO3's millionth fan work, when I realised I haven't posted about the OTW at all!
See, I'm a volunteer at OTW these days, ever since
christycorr roped me into joining in November last year. She's a big OTW activist herself and pretty much tried to talk me into joining as a translator since the third time we met :P I've done some translating in the university, and I know that it takes up a lot of time, so I turned it down for the moment. Then they found a Finnish translator and just needed a beta... Basically,
christycorr bribed me into joining with cake (Derek Hale should've tried the same trick).
It's still pretty time-consuming, even as just a beta, and some of the topics are frankly terrifying. The first document I betaed was about the technical tools the OTW uses, like GitHub. Which has an English-only user interface, so good luck with those "pull request" translations! Then the FAQ about tags is 20 pages long, and it just seems so daunting to even begin. I don't know how my translator does it, just starts from an empty page. I've translated some short template answers myself, but that's about the extent I can stretch to.
Still, it's fun. It's a really nice feeling just helping out, and even though it has me pulling at my hair more than is frankly healthy, I enjoy trying to wrangle (some Translation humour for you right there) Finnish into producing decent translations for terms like "legal advocacy". You learn so much about your own language when doing translation, and it's amazing what everyday English terms and words are completely absent from Finnish.
Plus all the staffers are frankly amazing, with how much time and effort they put into this. When you're just browsing AO3 for fic, you don't stop to think about that none of it would be possible if not for the thousands of people who give their time freely and pour their heart into it completely for free, just for fandom.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth. You can also comment there using OpenID.
See, I'm a volunteer at OTW these days, ever since
christycorr roped me into joining in November last year. She's a big OTW activist herself and pretty much tried to talk me into joining as a translator since the third time we met :P I've done some translating in the university, and I know that it takes up a lot of time, so I turned it down for the moment. Then they found a Finnish translator and just needed a beta... Basically,
christycorr bribed me into joining with cake (Derek Hale should've tried the same trick).
It's still pretty time-consuming, even as just a beta, and some of the topics are frankly terrifying. The first document I betaed was about the technical tools the OTW uses, like GitHub. Which has an English-only user interface, so good luck with those "pull request" translations! Then the FAQ about tags is 20 pages long, and it just seems so daunting to even begin. I don't know how my translator does it, just starts from an empty page. I've translated some short template answers myself, but that's about the extent I can stretch to.
Still, it's fun. It's a really nice feeling just helping out, and even though it has me pulling at my hair more than is frankly healthy, I enjoy trying to wrangle (some Translation humour for you right there) Finnish into producing decent translations for terms like "legal advocacy". You learn so much about your own language when doing translation, and it's amazing what everyday English terms and words are completely absent from Finnish.
Plus all the staffers are frankly amazing, with how much time and effort they put into this. When you're just browsing AO3 for fic, you don't stop to think about that none of it would be possible if not for the thousands of people who give their time freely and pour their heart into it completely for free, just for fandom.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth. You can also comment there using OpenID.