(no subject)
I've gotten a whole host of emails and comments about this lately, so I thought I'd note it for the record here. I'm not really comfortable with others translating my fic into other languages. I used to have a very different policy, but events with plagiarism and general bad conduct sort of made me change my mind. I totally appreciate the offer, but as someone who's done (academic) translation work before, I'm well aware that translating is a difficult, demanding thing, and fiction is full of things that are incredibly difficult to translate literally. Most translators work with authors when translating books and so on, and since that's not possible here, I worry that the story is changing in translation, and there's no way for me to know.
The other issue is with credit; I do not want a lot of versions of my stories floating about on the internet where I can't be sure what's going on with them. (Read: the time that someone converted a whole lot of my Harry Potter fic into Buffy fandom through a find and replace on the names.) Every single time someone has asked to translate for me and I've politely requested that they provide me with a link to the translated story, it hasn't happened. The last reason is really a personal thing; a lot of people ask to translate some of my oldest fic. I'm proud of almost all of my SPN stories, but a lot of my old HP stuff is from a period when I was a far worse writer. I'm happy to leave it up because I know that some people still enjoy it and that's part of being a writer, you don't really get to hit an "undo" button once you share something, but I feel odd about "republishing" fiction (through translation) that's four or five years old for new readers. Anyway - I do appreciate the offer, which is extremely flattering, but I would prefer that people not translate.
(Just for the general record - this doesn't apply at all to podfic or english pdf conversions for e-fic comms, which I am nearly always happy to allow others to do!)
The other issue is with credit; I do not want a lot of versions of my stories floating about on the internet where I can't be sure what's going on with them. (Read: the time that someone converted a whole lot of my Harry Potter fic into Buffy fandom through a find and replace on the names.) Every single time someone has asked to translate for me and I've politely requested that they provide me with a link to the translated story, it hasn't happened. The last reason is really a personal thing; a lot of people ask to translate some of my oldest fic. I'm proud of almost all of my SPN stories, but a lot of my old HP stuff is from a period when I was a far worse writer. I'm happy to leave it up because I know that some people still enjoy it and that's part of being a writer, you don't really get to hit an "undo" button once you share something, but I feel odd about "republishing" fiction (through translation) that's four or five years old for new readers. Anyway - I do appreciate the offer, which is extremely flattering, but I would prefer that people not translate.
(Just for the general record - this doesn't apply at all to podfic or english pdf conversions for e-fic comms, which I am nearly always happy to allow others to do!)