Every now and then I think about how subtitles (or dubs), and thus translation choices, shape our perception of the media we consume. It's so interesting. I'd wager anyone who speaks two (or more) languages knows the feeling of "yeah, that's what it literally translates to, but that's not what it means" or has answered a question like "how do you say _____ in (language)?" with "you don't, it's just … not a thing, we don't say that."

I've had my fair share of "[SHIP] are [married/soulmates/fated/FANCY TERM], it's text!" "[CHARACTER A] calls [CHARACTER B] [ENDEARMENT/NICKNAME], it's text!" and every time. Every time I'm just like. Do they though. Is it though. And a lot of the time, this means seeking out alternative translations, or translation meta from fluent or native speakers, or sometimes from language learners of the language the piece of media is originally in.

Why does it matter? Maybe it doesn't. To lots of people, it doesn't. People have different interests and priorities in fiction and the way they interact with it. It's great. It matters to me because back in the early 2000s, I had dial-up internet. Video or audio media that wasn't available through my local library very much wasn't available, but fanfiction was. So I started to read English language Gundam Wing fanfic before I ever had a chance to watch the show. When I did get around to watching Gundam Wing, it was the original Japanese dub. Some of the characters were almost unrecognisable to me, and first I doubted my Japanese language ability, then, after checking some bits with friends, I wondered why even my favourite writers, writers I knew to be consistent in other things, had made these characters seem so different … until I had the chance to watch the US-English dub a few years later. Going by that adaptation, the characterisation from all those stories suddenly made a lot more sense. And the thing is, that interpretation is also valid! They just took it a direction that was a larger leap for me to make.

Loose adaptations and very free translations have become less frequent since, or maybe my taste just hasn't led me their way, but the issue at the core is still a thing: Supernatural fandom got different nuances of endings for their show depending on the language they watched it in. CQL and MDZS fandom and the never-ending discussions about 知己 vs soulmate vs Other Options. A subset of VLD fans looking at a specific clip in all the different languages to see what was being said/implied in which dub, and how different translators interpreted the same English original line. The list is pretty much endless.

And that's … idk if it's fine, but it's what happens! A lot of the time, concepts -- expressed in language -- don't translate 1:1. The larger the cultural gap, the larger the gaps between the way concepts are expressed or understood also tend to be. Other times, there is a literal translation that works but isn't very idiomatic because there's a register mismatch or worse. And that's even before cultural assumptions come in. It's normal to have those. It's also important to remember that things like "thanks I hate it" as a sentiment of praise/affection, while the words translate literally quite easily, emphatically isn't easy to translate in the sense anglophone internet users the phrase.

Every translation is, at some level, a transformative work. Sometimes expressions or concepts or even single words simply don't have an exact equivalent in the target language and need to be interpreted at the translator's discretion, especially when going from a high-context/listener-responsible source language to a low-context/speaker-responsible target language (where high-context/listener responsible roughly means a large amount of contextual information can be omitted by the speaker because it's the listener's responsibility to infer it and ask for clarification if needed, and low-context/speaker-responsible roughly means a lot of information needs to be codified in speech, i.e. the speaker is responsible for providing sufficiently explicit context and will be blamed if it's lacking).

Is this a mouse or a rat? Guess based on context clues! High-context languages can and frequently do omit entire parts of speech that lower-context/speaker-responsible languages like English regard as essential, such as the grammatical subject of a sentence: the equivalent of "Go?" - "Go." does largely the same amount of heavy lifting as "is he/she/it/are you/they/we going?" - "yes, I am/he/she/it is/we/you/they are" in several listener-responsible languages, but tends to seem clumsy or incomplete in more speaker-responsible ones. This does NOT mean the listener-responsible language is clumsy. It's arguably more efficient! And reversely, saying "Are you going?" - "I am (going)" might seem unnecessarily convoluted and clumsy in a listener-responsible language. All depending on context.

This gets tricky both when the ambiguity of the missing subject of the sentence is clearly important (is speaker A asking "are you going" or "is she going"? wait until next chapter and find out!) AND when it's important that the translator assign an explicit subject in order for the sentence to make sense in the target language. For our example, depending on context, something like "are we all going?" - "yes" or "they going, too?" might work. Context!

As a consequence of this, sometimes, translation adds things – we gain things in translation, so to speak. Sometimes, it's because the target language needs the extra information (like the subject in the examples above), sometimes it's because the target language actually differentiates between mouse and rat even though the source language doesn't. However, because in most cases translators don't have access to the original authors, or even the original authors' agencies to ask for clarification (and in most cases wouldn't get paid for the time to put in this extra work even if they did), this kind of addition is almost always an interpretation. Sometimes made with a lot of certainty, sometimes it's more of a "fuck it, I've got to put something and hope it doesn't get proven wrong next episode/chapter/ten seasons down" (especially fun when you're working on a series that's in progress).

For the vast majority of cases, several translations are valid. Some may be more far-fetched than others, and there'll always be subjectivity to whether something was translated effectively, what "effectively" even means …

ANYWAY. I think my point is … how interesting, how cool is it that engaging with media in multiple languages will always yield multiple, often equally valid but just sliiiiightly different versions of that piece of media? And that I'd love more conversations about how, the second we (as folks who don't speak the material's original language) start picking the subtitle or dub wording apart for meta, we're basically working from a secondary source, and if we're doing due diligence, to which extent do we need to check there's nothing substantial being (literally) lost -- or added! -- in translation?

You don't need to ask my permission to make fan art/fan fics/whatever of my audios. Do whatever the hell you want. You can write fics about them getting murdered, you can draw NSFW art of them, you can do the most horrid things imaginable. I literally don't care, all of this shit is imaginary. I'm a believer in total freedom when it comes to transformative works, audio roleplay characters are no exception. I hold this standard both to IPs owned by big studios/publishers as well as amateur and independent creators like myself. I don't have any power over how others creatively express themselves and I have no interest in pretending that I do. Go fucking wild.

It's rare I get truly batshit comments, but when I do they really go big or go home.

Welp, lets get to it folks

Transcript:

“we want pollution fast, oil transportation is an obvious strategy.”

- ich Bru, executive Club

The Science of Hypnotism Audiobook Parts 1 & 2

Part 1 has the Preface and Table of Contents, and Part 2 has Chapter 1 in its entirety. There'll be about 15 more videos in this series, it'll be the complete book. The book is from 1899 and reads like it's from 1999 in a lot of ways.

I'm using a new microphone now and everything sounds a lot better! If you're a Patreon supporter you may have already heard these chapters a few weeks back, when I was still using the old mic. Expect a chapter or two a week until the book is done!

normalize sharing comments you’ve gotten on your fics as reasons for other people to read your work. include them when you post your links and previews. normalize sharing your successes and praise, you deserve it.

I'm not lowkey crying over a fic-jim's bar owner ed/stede au fic, that would be ridiculous even for being on my period

Bobby McFerrin - Don’t Worry Be Happy//Community 3x16 Virtual Systems Analysis//System Collapse (Murderbot Diaries) – Martha Wells//The Magicians 1x12 Thirty-Nine Graves//Phineas and Ferb 2x32 Ladies and Gentlemen, Meet Max Modem!//Uncle Kracker – Drift Away//John Constantine, Hellblazer: Newcastle Calling//Decameron (trans. Wayne A. Rebhorn)//Star Trek: The Next Generation 6x5 Schisms//Norman Rockwell – Triple Self Portrait//RuPaul – Jealous Of My Boogie//Futurama 5x16 The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings//Revenant Gun (Machineries of Empire) – Yoon Ha Lee//tumblr ad//Dresden Dolls – Sing//Mary Cassatt – Reading "Le Figaro"//Winnie-the-Pooh – A. A. Milne//DC’s Legends of Tomorrow 5x2 Meet the Legends//Odyssey (trans. Richmond Lattimore)//Beowulf (trans. Francis B. Gummere)//Grimms’ Fairy Tales (trans. Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes)//Eiffel 65 – Blue (Da Ba Dee)//Red Hood and the Outlaws: The Life of Bizarro

Concept: detransformative fiction. Take a piece of original fiction, construe the protagonist as a fanfic self-insert, extrapolate the notional author’s creative priorities, and work backwards from there to “reconstruct” the purely hypothetical original work that the actual, published work might have been based on.

just got a second official warning for my use of "from the river to the sea, palestine will be free" on the OTW volunteer slack

people are also currently asking board to ban saying that the founding of israel was colonialism—equating this to saying racial slurs—and were complaining about my status back when it was "palestine will be free", too

suffice to say, fuck that place, don't give the OTW your money, and don't fucking volunteer there

EDIT: Please see my pinned post for additional screenshots. There are a lot. Thank you.

(the second screenshot is from the warning I got a few days ago)

AO3 Celebrates 12 Million Posted Fanworks

The Archive of Our Own has reached the milestone of 12 million published fanworks! Read more about how the archive works (and doesn't) when it comes to algorithms, tags and bookmarks! https://otw.news/02c68e

Long ago someone once told me that “Harry Potter is the ‘little black dress’ of [fan fic/crossover fic]”. I never really cared for HP as a story, and more (less?) so now because of the hate hole the author cannot dig herself out of. As someone still writing HP fic in the modern age, would you be able to explain the above adage? What exactly is it about HP mythos that’s so attractive for crossover fic?

Thank you for your insight.

I'm very tired so I apologize for what will likely not be a super coherent response but here we go:

I've never heard it expressed this way, but I think the sentiment is accurate. I can't answer for everyone, obviously, but the appeal of HP for me (despite JK Rowling's awfulness and the inherent problematic aspects of the material itself) is A. nostalgia and B. the HP world's ability to work as a foundation for a plethora of genres/tropes that can easily be adapted by writers while still being recognized by readers.

The A. is pretty self-explanatory. I read the first HP book when I was 12 and a new one was released pretty much every year after that. I grew up with Harry Potter and the HP fandom. I know a lot of queer folks my age have a similar attachment, and JK's terfness has actually encouraged us to write/create more fandom content as a way of reclaiming the material (I said in another post, we don't just believe in Death of the Author in this house, we believe in Murdering the Author and then rifling through her stuff to keep the good things and toss the bad). The B, which is more what you're referring to, I think, is the foundational aspect. HP is a cultural phenomenon. Most people in the US over the age of 10 at least have a basic knowledge of the world/characters, which means it's a great anchor point for people creating media. It also encompasses, or can support, a really diverse breadth and depth of genres/tropes. The world is large, which means the sandbox for transformative fans to play in is also large. And a lot of the sandbox is gestured to but unexplored in canon. The possibilities are endless. You can write a fantasy, a mystery, a romance, a sports romance, a buddy cop narrative, a kidfic, a coffee shop au, etc. and it's all, more or less, in-universe. Because the universe contains multitudes. The HP fandom is also VERY forgiving/supportive of diversions from canon within "canon" worldbuilding. It's probably the most supportive I've seen. I mean, the majority of fic I've read is proudly tagged as canon non-compliant and/or epilogue? what epilogue? Most fic falls into two camps, I think: "I love this, so I'm writing more" and "This thing has promise but you fucked it up and I'm going fix it." I feel like a good portion of HP fandom, at least today, is doing the latter. The first HP fic I wrote, and the one I'm working on now, play very fast and loose with the magical dynamics Rowling set up, completely throw out her shitty werewolf rhetoric, and are focused on trauma and creature politics--something Rowling didn't really address in any depth (and what little she did I'm ignoring). But I can do all of that while still being anchored in a familiar environment that folks feel comfortable in.

Hopefully, that makes sense. And if anyone wants to add to (or disagree with!) my thoughts, go for it.

have you visited the worlds largest foot? It is florida, or maybe italy (which one is bigger?)

Transcript:

booming dirt hasn’t declined. the world’s largest foot

How long?

“Very long” said We

transformers are so cool

on ao3's current fundraiser

apparently it’s time for ao3’s biannual donation drive, which means it’s time for me to remind you all, that regardless of how much you love ao3, you shouldn’t donate to them because they HAVE TOO MUCH MONEY AND NO IDEA WHAT TO DO WITH IT.

we’ve known for years that ao3 – or, more specifically, the organization for transformative works (@transformativeworks on tumblr), or otw, who runs ao3 and other fandom projects – has a lot of money in their “reserves” that they had no plans for. but in 2023, @manogirl and i did some research on this, and now, after looking at their more recent financial statements, i’ve determined that at the beginning of 2024, they had almost $2.8 MILLION US DOLLARS IN SURPLUS.

our full post last year goes over the principles of how we determined this, even though the numbers are for 2023, but the key points still stand (with the updated numbers):

when we say “surplus”, we are not including money that they estimate they need to spend in 2024 for their regular expenses. just the extra that they have no plan for

yes, nonprofits do need to keep some money in reserves for emergencies; typically, nonprofits registered in the u.s. tend to keep enough to cover between six months and two years of their regular operating expenses (meaning, the rough amount they need each month to keep their services going). $2.8 million USD is enough to keep otw running for almost FIVE YEARS WITHOUT NEW DONATIONS

they always overshoot their fundraisers: as i’m posting this, they’ve already raised $104,751.62 USD from their current donation drive, which is over double what they’ve asked for! on day two of the fundraiser!!

no, we are not trying to claim they are embezzling this money or that it is a scam. we believe they are just super incompetent with their money. case in point: that surplus that they have? only earned them $146 USD in interest in 2022, because only about $10,000 USD of their money invested in an interest-bearing account. that’s the interest they earn off of MILLIONS. at the very least they should be using this extra money to generate new revenue – which would also help with their long-term financial security – but they can’t even do that

no, they do not need this money to use if they are sued. you can read more about this in the full post, but essentially, they get most of their legal services donated, and they have not, themselves, said this money is for that purpose

i'm not going to go through my process for determining the updated 2024 numbers because i want to get this post out quickly, and otw actually had not updated the sources i needed to get these numbers until the last couple days (seriously, i've been checking), but you can easily recreate the process that @manogirl and i outlined last year with these documents:

otw’s 2022 audited financial statement, to determine how much money they had at the end of 2022

otw’s 2024 budget spreadsheet, to determine their net income in 2023 and how much they transferred to and from reserves at the beginning of 2024

otw’s 2022 form 990 (also available on propublica), which is a tax document, and shows how much interest they earned in 2022 (search “interest” and you’ll find it in several places)  

also, otw has not been accountable to answering questions about their surplus. typically, they hold a public meeting with their finance committee every year in september or october so people can ask questions directly to their treasurer and other committee members; as you can imagine, after doing this deep dive last summer, i was looking forward to getting some answers at that meeting!

but they cancelled that meeting in 2023, and instead asked people to write to the finance committee through their contact us form online. fun fact: i wrote a one-line message to the finance committee on may 11, 2023 through that form, when @manogirl and i were doing this research, asking them for clarification on how much they have in their reserves. i have still not received a response.

so yeah. please spend your money on people who actually need it, like on mutual aid requests! anyone who wants to share their mutual aid requests, please do so in the replies and i’ll share them out – i didn’t want to link directly to individual requests without permission in case this leads to anyone getting harassed, but i would love to share your requests. to start with, here's operation olive branch and their ongoing spreadsheet sharing palestinian folks who need money to escape genocide.

oh, and if you want to write to otw and tell them why you are not donating, i'm not sure it’ll get any results, but it can’t hurt lol. here's their contact us form – just don’t expect a response! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯