Archive of Our Own ^beta

Last November we asked the community to submit questions to our OTW volunteers in celebration of International Volunteer Day. In this series of posts we will spotlight some of our committees' responses.

The Translation committee's main responsibility is making content from the OTW and its various projects accessible to fans who don't speak English. This includes content for the organization's main site, FAQs on AO3, Open Doors import announcements, and AO3 news posts, among other things. They also collaborate with other OTW committees, for example to help them communicate with non-English speaking fans and users.

We asked the Translation committee for replies to your questions, and received a lot of feedback! Below you can find a selection of their answers:

Translation Committee Specific Question

Question: Is there a software required if one wanted to volunteer? Also, are there any specific devices required?
Committee answer:
While we have no specific software requirements for volunteering, we definitely recommend using a device with a bigger screen in general, like a desktop or a laptop, or at least a tablet, as that makes it easier to keep everything you need for your work on your screen. One of our requirements for any software we use is that it can run in a common internet browser on a computer, without any local installs, though they may require an app on mobile devices.

General Questions

How many hours a week do you spend on your OTW volunteer work?

• It varies a lot week to week! Some weeks are very quiet and there's not a lot to work on, but when I do get an assignment, I tend to spend about a couple of hours on it, and that will usually be it for the week unless we're working on time sensitive tasks or projects, when things can get more hectic! Translation in particular sets generous deadlines to complete our assignments (5 or 7 days depending on what we're working on), which gives us plenty of time to work on it even after RL work hours and factoring in other real life things. I also sometimes help the Tag Wrangling team with their Spanish tags, but that accounts for a couple of minutes of quick work overall, I'd say. So... tl;dr, about 2-3 hours, give or take, depending on what we have to do for the week! (Saku)
• It depends on the task, but an average of 2-3 hours per week suffices. (Nameless_ghoul_7)

How do you manage your volunteer time, and do you do the same thing every day like with a day job?

• I usually find time for this during the weekend, considering my day job, so it's more of a weekend activity for me. And I prefer to do my translation in one go, and then go through it again afterwards in my free time post weekday work.
  It's definitely taught me to be good at time management, because you can't predict how your week is going to go at any point. (Ana)
• I use a time tracker to help me track the time I spend on OTW volunteer tasks, though that usually ends up working more in retrospective, where towards the end of each week I look at the hours I did to evaluate whether my current workload is adequate or whether I should delegate some of my work to other people (or if that's not an option, what I can deprioritise and put off until a bit later). I usually try to pick up some volunteer manager or chair trainee work every other day or so (unless I'm working on something that requires daily attention), just to avoid driving myself insane, because at the end of the day there's always more work I could be picking up still. (Rhine)

What's your favorite part about volunteering at the OTW?

• My favourite part of volunteering at the OTW has been meeting several new people from around the world and seeing how our different POVs and experiences help with different understandings of life in different spaces and how independently of our differences, cultures and upbringing we're united by pure passion for what we do in and for fandom. Passion and compassion is often hidden or missing in "work spaces" and the OTW has been a positive space filled with positive learning experiences for me since the moment I started volunteering. It's an ever evolving space that takes every instance to be better. (CottonDuck)
• I was going to say "the people!" and that is mostly true (I've met some wonderful folks as part of Translation, and it's been a great time overall!), but if I sit down to really think about it, I think my favorite part is that it feels very gratifying to be giving back to a community that has done so much for fandom and fan spaces. I don't read a lot of fanfiction myself anymore, much as I do occasionally write it, but fandom is still very important to me and I've made a lot of good friends thanks to it, so it feels good to be able to contribute my time and skills and do something for a space that has done so much for me in turn. It's good work and good people all around, and it feels good to be part of it through my work for the OTW and AO3. (Saku)

What's the aspect of volunteer work with the OTW that you most wish more people knew about?

• How chill the Translation volunteer managers are! If we need something, be it a hiatus, more time on a task, or clarification on some part of the text, we’re pretty much always granted them! And having a full week to do the task is very nice too, I originally thought it was going to be much more hectic. (kati)
• The sheer scope of work that is involved! There are so many volunteers, like, seriously, *so many*, and each of us have our own little roles to perform, thus helping everything run like clockwork. Having said all that, it's all strictly on a volunteer basis, which makes it probably the only “work place” I've seen where we all actually enjoy doing what we do. (Ana)

What does a typical day as an OTW volunteer looks like for you?

• Mostly the same as any normal day. Only that I set apart one or two hours most days to translate what's been assigned to me. (ttom)
• It varies a lot! As Translation volunteer managers, we handle several different tasks, depending on the time of year, and what projects are currently going on. For example, if I'm on duty for managing our email inbox and handing out tasks for the week—we alternate regularly—I'll set aside around 2-3 hours a day after work for that. When we are recruiting for new translators, I'll spend a chunk of time in a week holding interviews. There are also routine tasks that each of us rotates through, like preparing meetings or coordinating the upload of translated content to the OTW and AO3 websites. Independent of the task, I usually work through shorter items on my to-do list on weekday nights, and leave bigger tasks for the weekend. (Elin)

What is your favorite animal? Alternatively, do you have a favorite breed of cat/dog?

• Cats... I love cats and I have one. (Nameless_ghoul_7)
• Cats, giraffes, turtles, butterflies, and I can go on. As for cats, I love the Egyptian Maus that I currently have. (AnneHelena)
• My favourite animal is the betta! I loved aquaculture a lot!! My favourite breed of dog is the Indian Pariah Dog. (Aditi Mandavgane)

Do you enjoy reading fanfic? If so, what's your favorite work on AO3?

• I love reading fanfics and it's difficult to choose a favourite one. But among the recent fics I am reading, Bifurcation Sandbox by Gardenersnake8822 is a favourite. (Gloriosa)
• I love reading fanfic! It's definitely become a hobby, and has been the brunt of my reading as of late (because books are expensive < / 3). It's really difficult to pick a favorite work, since I've read so many amazing fics, but if I had to pick one, I'd pick "The Lowlander" by user foxymoxy! It's a BTS-Dragon Age crossover fic that takes the captor/prisoner trope and really dissects and does something interesting with it. It's one of my all-time favorites, and I re-read it all the time. (Somber)

Do you write any fanfic yourself? What do you enjoy about it?

• Yes! I have a writing account on some platforms like AO3 (ofc, duh), Twitter, Wattpad, and Medium. There are so many things I love about writing. But, I’m going to list 3 of them here:
  1. I can finally read my ship in tropes that I really wanted to read.
  2. The research process. I gained knowledge while doing my hobby. I learn how to write better, to portray the emotion better, to explore and experiment with my characters’ personality, discover interesting information, and so on.
  3. It helps me clear my mind. (Keane)
• I used to write original stories that never went anywhere and only started writing and publishing fanfiction in order to learn about AO3's user interface so that I could translate the tutorials more accurately. I like how freeing it feels not to have to worry too much about writing well enough for the general audience – it's just me and the five people (at most) who will ever see my silly little stories! (Slovenian Translation volunteer)

What fandoms are you (currently) in?

• I’m currently obsessed with F1: The Movie and Ocean's Eleven Trilogy. (Cassie)
• I've been in the Star Wars fandom for more than 20 years at this point, mostly on the Rogue One / Andor side nowadays. (Auré)

Do you feel glad or proud to see fanfiction in your mother tongue?

• My answer is yes, absolutely! Especially on AO3 in particular, because Mandarin Chinese authors have been facing immense opposition in the form of censorship and takedowns of both digital and physical publications of our works. The 227 incident that resulted in AO3 being banned in Mainland China was a major turning point in the involvement of AO3 within Chinese fandom communities, so every time I see a new Mandarin Chinese work on AO3 I'm always grateful that one more author has found a safe avenue to share their creations with the rest of fandom. (Chinese Translation volunteer)
• Absolutely! My first language is Portuguese and I always find it surprising when I see works on some fandoms that are definitely not popular in my country. It’s like an invisible thread suddenly connects me to someone I don’t know but share two things in common: a language and a love for a fandom that makes us want to spend time and effort creating something to share with that community. Funny enough, I usually like to read fanfics in the language my brain associates them with. For example, I don’t speak Korean, and I usually watch K-dramas with English subtitles to continue learning English, so that’s the language my brain associates that series with. When I see a work in Portuguese for that fandom, it’s like my horizons have suddenly been broadened. And if I get a chance to make an online friend because of it? Even better! (Amanda)
• I translate English to Marathi, and I don't see a lot of Marathi fanfic on the site, but when I stumble upon one, my heart soars and I feel on top of the world! (Aditi Mandavgane)

Thanks so much to every volunteer who took the time to answer!

(For more answers from Translation volunteers, check out this work on AO3, where we'll collect additional replies to each question!)

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Rhine, who volunteers as a volunteer manager in the Translation Committee.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

As a Translation volunteer manager I mostly deal with admin work that surrounds the work our translators do – be it talking to other committees about things that are to be translated, preparing English texts for translation, making sure our version of the text is up to date, or getting texts published once they are translated – along with more general personnel stuff like recruiting new translators, keeping a clear record of who is supposed to be working on what and who is on break, checking in with translators and how they feel about their work, that kind of thing. Having been in this role for some time now, I also help with mentoring newer volunteer managers in how to do what we do, at the scale we do it.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

There isn't one singular stereotypical week in this role, but some different modes with different focuses that are more or less typical for me:

• Going on-call for a week: Translation volunteer managers work from a shared inbox that serves as a first point of contact for all inquiries related to the Translation Committee. Each week, one or two volunteer managers go on-call as the ones primarily responsible for making sure everything gets actioned and squared away as needed. This usually means spending a couple hours each day working through everything in the shared inbox, including but not limited to assigning tasks to translators, checking on translators who were on hiatus, triaging translation requests from other committees, and responding to any questions translators may have in the course of their work.
• Working on a bigger project, like a series of high-visibility posts (e.g. membership drive, OTW Board elections), opening recruitment, or internal surveys: When Translation does a committee-wide thing, it'll by necessity involve most or even all of our forty-some language teams, each with 1–8 members. Coordinating all that takes some organisational overhead (and some love for checklists and spreadsheets, along with automations where feasible), which typically means sitting down for a few hours on three or four days of the week and chipping away at various related tasks to keep things moving, including but not limited to asking other people to double-check my work before moving on to the next step.
• Working on smaller tasks: When I want to have a more relaxed week while still being active, I'll sit down on one or two afternoons/evenings, and take care of a task that is fairly straightforward, like scheduling and leading chats to check in with translators or train people on our tools, creating a template document with English text for translation, drafting and updating our internal documentation, asking others to look over and give feedback on my drafts, and giving feedback on others' tasks, drafts, and projects.
• Weekly chair training/catch-up chats: We have a regular weekly meeting slot to sit down and talk about the few chair-exclusive things in the Translation Committee, as part of chair training.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I actually started volunteering at the OTW as an AO3 tag wrangler back in 2020, when lockdowns were on the horizon and I felt like I could pick up some extra stuff to do. Growing up bilingual and with some extra languages under my belt, I ended up hanging out in some of the spaces with lots of OTW translators. Then I found out that I could internally apply as a Translation volunteer manager, and the rest is pretty much history. At that point I was missing the feeling of doing some volunteer management and admin work anyway!

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

On a high level, I'd say it's striking a balance between the expectations and the reality of the work the Translation Committee does, including the sheer scale. On a more concrete level, it's like this: Being a translator in the Translation Committee is, by default, a relatively low commitment, with a number of optional tasks and rosters that we encourage people to take on, if they have the time and attention to spare. Part of how we ensure that is by dealing with as much of the overhead in advance as we can, as Translation volunteer managers.

This means that for instance, when the English version of a text is updated – which may take about two minutes in the original text – we go through each language team's copy of the text, make the changes as needed in the English copy, highlight what was changed, and reset the status in our internal task tracker so that it can be reassigned to a translator. This way the changed part is clearly visible to the translator, so they can quickly pinpoint what they need to do and make the corresponding changes in the translated text.

For both the author of the original English text and the translator, this is a very quick task. On the admin side, on the other hand, it's the same two-minute process of updating our documents repeated over and over, about 15 times on the low end for frequent news post series that we only assign to teams that consistently have some buffer to absorb the extra workload, and almost 50 times on the high end for some of our staple static pages that (almost) all teams have worked on, meaning it's something that takes somewhere between 30 minutes to almost two hours even when it's a tiny change and you're familiar with the workflow.

(And that's before getting to very last-minute changes and emergency news post translations with less than two days' turnaround time, where we manually track everything across around thirty teams, usually. Each time that has happened, everyone's dedication has blown me away. Thank you so much to everyone who answers those calls, you know who you are!)

What fannish things do you like to do?

I like to read, especially if it's something that plays around with worldbuilding or other things that were left unsaid in canon. I wish there were more hours in the day so that I can pick up some of my creative projects again. I suppose some of my coding projects like my AO3 userscripts and my AO3 Saved Filters bookmarklet also count as fannish?

Now that our volunteer's said five things about what they do, it's your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with LPCollins, who volunteers as a Dutch translator and beta reader for the Translation Committee.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

I am part of the Translation committee, more specifically as a translator and beta reader for the Dutch team. (Hallo, iedereen!) I have also recently found my way into the Tag Wrangling committee, but that is all still very new and shiny, so I’ll be focussing on my role in Translation for this post. That role pretty much means that I help with the translation of the AO3 FAQs and tutorials, news posts, email templates and the occasional tag or user ticket that arrives in Dutch, a rare treat when speakers of your language are very accustomed to using English in online spaces. I am very proud of the role that our committee gets to play in diversifying the OTW and slowly but surely making it more accessible for users world-wide. Compared to the userbase speaking Chinese, Spanish or Russian, Dutch may seem like a very tiny, not-so-important piece of that puzzle, but doesn’t that only make it cooler that we can support such languages too?

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

One of my absolute favorite things about the Translation committee is that you get to schedule the work according to your own needs. I am a chaos demon with fluctuating energy levels, so I’m not sure about having a “typical week” and that’s perfectly fine with Translation.

Basically, at some point one of our lovely volunteer managers will send me an assignment, either a document that needs to be translated from scratch or a translation from one of my teammates that I need to beta read. Assignments always have a deadline too, shorter ones for urgent news posts and longer ones for longer documents. Depending on the length of the document, what I need to do with it, my mood and the alignment of the stars, I might do it right away, or spread it out over a week, or just do it on the day of the deadline. Then I let our staff know that I’m done and they send me a new task and so on. There have been weeks when I didn’t complete a single task and there have been days when I completed two, and it just works for me.

What made you decide to volunteer?

Look, I seem to be living in a world where all the paid jobs aren’t very interesting and all the interesting jobs aren’t very paid. (Will take recommendations for other worlds.) Point is, I am always drawn to ways to help organizations that I care about with a hands-on approach. Before I joined the OTW, I was a volunteer for IMAlive’s crisis support chat (big shout-out to Random Acts for providing my training), which I loved doing but unfortunately became too time-consuming when I needed to start working on my master’s thesis. Since I had been spending a lot of time on AO3 for years at that point, the OTW was an easy next target for when I did have some spare time again.

I also have a degree in Dutch and English linguistics and literature, so translator was definitely one of the most appealing OTW positions from the get-go. I distinctly remember waiting for a chance to apply, checking every Translation recruitment post that popped up on AO3 to see if they needed someone for Team Dutch yet, as the committee always recruits for specific languages. As soon as Dutch was listed in one of the posts, I didn’t hesitate about applying, and I was lucky enough to be welcomed to the team. Already two years have passed since then and I haven’t regretted it for a single second.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

Not gonna lie, I have witnessed some big internal discussions since joining the OTW, both about real-world events and about our own processes. I feel like those have been fought over enough, though, so I’ll share a challenge that’s more specific for Team Dutch.

In case you don’t know, Dutch is an official language in three countries: the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname. Unfortunately, Suriname isn’t currently represented in our team, but we do have both Belgian and Dutch folks, and despite our countries being right next to each other, there are actually some differences between Belgian Dutch and Dutch… Dutch. (Just ask how we end our emails.) They definitely aren’t big enough to separate the languages, but we do try to walk that middle ground in our translations and make sure that everything sounds good for everyone. So sometimes I will be beta reading a document and change something that just sounds way too Dutch to me and sometimes one of my teammates will point out that they would never use my suggested turn of phrase in the Netherlands. As a linguist, I find this very interesting, but it is also quite challenging to avoid colloquialisms when you’re not even always aware of them!

What fannish things do you like to do?

First and foremost, I’m a fanfic writer. Always have been (even before I knew that there was a word for it) and always will be. As a writer, I also have an atrocious habit and it goes something like this: start a very long fic, pour out new chapters religiously for months and months, stumble upon a different fandom, come up with a fic idea for said new fandom that “surely won’t take long and that I just need to get out of my system so that I can return to the existing WIP in peace” aaaaand repeat. Dear reader, if you happen to be following one of my stories, I am so, so sorry, I swear I will finish it one day.

The love of my life is Supernatural and I will always come back to it, but I’m also very good at falling very hard for other fandoms on the side, ranging from The Boys to Danny Phantom to the latest Neil Gaiman-related show to Helluva Boss to anything that Richard Speight, Jr. worked on. One of my favorite things to do is hyperfixate on something new, then grab my friends by the shoulders and shake them until they agree to watch it too so that I can yell at them about it.

Of course I read fanfics too, mostly in short bursts when I’m looking for a very specific type of fic. For my wallet’s sake, I limit the number of Supernatural conventions I can go to to one per year. I perpetually have a Discord tab open to stay in touch with fellow fans, will occasionally scour YouTube for fanvids and spend the rest of my fandom time on the best social media site ever, Tumblr. (Kidding, not kidding.)

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Silarona, who volunteers for our Translation Committee.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

I’m a translator and team-coordinator in Team Hungarian and a graphics volunteer for the Translation committee. Our team translates all content you can find in Hungarian on the site: the FAQs, Tutorials, News Posts. (Those three are my favourites. Who needs a normal, regular-length post with nice sentences? It’s either 30 pages of interface talk or announcements with untranslatable fandom terms.) We are also the ones who will help Support, Abuse and Tag Wrangling if needed, so you can contact the OTW or tag stuff in Hungarian and it’ll be answered / wrangled to the right place.

As a team-coordinator I’m responsible for (hopefully) remembering if we as a team have a task or a decision to make—this is usually things like keeping our internal cheatsheet up-to-date, being ready with the texts we use for recruitment and checking translated graphics.

The graphics are edited by a separate team from the committee based on the translations the language teams put together. Sometimes it’s easy, like when I can snatch up the Hungarian graphics, and sometimes I butcher stuff, like when I tried to make my Photoshop handle Bengali and it firmly refused.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

I usually work in bursts, because I’m a procrastinator. Translators get week-long deadlines (depending on the length and urgency of the task) and we get helpful little reminders the day before our deadline, which is wonderful because then I finally remember that I have a task. This worked much better before I asked for the long documents—with more than 4 years at the OTW, I still can’t translate 16 pages in one sitting. (My comfortable limit is 5, with our two column view.)

This gets faster during Drives and Elections, when there is a lot of time-sensitive content and graphics to do, while I sometimes sit on a longer task for weeks when I’m busy with other stuff.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I saw Hungarian in the list of contact languages for the OTW, and I sent them a (very mistyped) message saying I’d love to help out if they need more people, because I could not get over the fact that my little language was available here. Does the OTW have recruitment periods and proper channels for this? Yes. Did I check anything about this? No. (Don’t do this. Check the recruitment notices!) I was lucky that the Hungarian team was relatively small then, so they allowed me to apply even though I trampled all over the procedure.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

Maybe setting my limits. I adore volunteering for the OTW — it pulled me out of some darker spots during the years and it’s very important to me. I also have a very chaotic offline schedule, with sometimes basically nothing but free time for months, during which I almost applied to other, more demanding roles so many times. Later I could give thanks to all the deities that I did not apply when my work started up again and I was unable to keep up with even current Translation tasks for months. I still haven’t grown out of this, so I’m just waiting for the day when my good judgement slips.

What fannish things do you like to do?

Besides spending an unhealthy amount of time on AO3 (don’t we all), I’m a fanartist. It’s also my pet peeve that the archive should have more fanart. I know it can be complicated compared to text, but upload your fanart and videos and all kinds of other creations to it! There are tutorials for this. All the pros of AO3 (tags, filtering, collections, easy search and archiving, etc) apply to every kind of fannish work, not just fic [commercial over].

I usually paint traditionally, sometimes on odd things like fans or notebooks (I bind custom-made notebooks too). I’m trying to draw a comic with questionable speed. I also beta-read, mostly for my fandom spouse. I have Moments when I sign up to four different fandom events in a week, then spend the next half a year in Bangs and Secret Santas, just to spend the next half a year remembering I can paint random stuff too.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Alba, who volunteers as a Translation volunteer for Team Catalan.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

Like other Translation teams, Team Catalan translates a variety of documents related to the OTW and its projects. Doing this makes them more accessible to even more people and creates a feeling of inclusion. My experience as a fan has been largely through English, and it is only now that I have to incorporate many common fannish terms to the translations to Catalan, that I realise that I need to change and adapt things. Thus, I believe every translation team’s work contributes to recognise the variety of cultures that come together in Fan Culture, as well as to a global enrichment of all of those. I like thinking that by means of translation we also make place for Fan Culture in our own languages. Is this too much to say? Perhaps, but it is a nice thought I hope to be realising.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

Study, work and make the most of my free time to watch something, read and complete OTW’s tasks. I think it is quite ordinary, not that much different from how it used to be before volunteering: I simply adapt the division of time to what I want or have to do. I would love to say that I organize my time efficiently and have a well-established routine, but the truth is I do everything along the way as I get the deadlines. I admit to being a terrible procrastinator, so OTW’s tasks are the perfect excuse to postpone things with less of a guilty feeling. I also recently fixed a couple of days a month to revise which documents need uploading so as to avoid them building up. Improvements in the organising field are a work in progress.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I had been fatally charmed by fanworks, fan activity and the space that fandom offered long ago. I spent great times thanks to AO3 and their creators, so I wanted to be involved somehow. I came across an OTW recruiting post for Translation and signed up without further thinking. I was sure it was a great opportunity to learn more about fan culture and improve my skills as a translator.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

Well, I already unveiled my not being the most organised person in the planet. Thank you staff for your patience! I am really shy and sometimes struggle to engage or voice my thoughts, so I can be rather passive. However, I ended up becoming co-coordinator of the Catalan team. In order to ensure we keep going in the right direction, improving our translations and helping the team become more comfortable in general, I am trying to do better in this too.

To be honest I was particularly surprised by the close and humane interactions between members of the team as well as the organization as a whole. Thus, despite my struggles I feel like I want to reciprocate, so I hope to be able to implement little by little everything the OTW is teaching me in the management of the team and future projects.

What fannish things do you like to do?

I keep a low activity profile at the moment, as I am not involved in any particular project. When I know enough, I would love to help with fansubbing. On another note, I love parody and dubbing videos I find around social media. So funny and creative! I also discovered recently an interest for Fan Studies and studies of transformative works, which I hope to pursue in the future. Thanks to all fanfic creators who helped me discover it. I hope I can keep reading your amazing stories for a long time!

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Rosa, who volunteers as a Translation volunteer for Team Swedish.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

I translate news posts and other types of documentation for the OTW from English to Swedish. That means I help to make the work the OTW does more accessible for people and spread the information about transformative works outside of the English-speaking world. Most Swedes are fluent in English and don’t expect things on the internet to be available in Swedish, but having access to things in your native language still helps create a global community of fans.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

As a translator, I’m assigned tasks to either translate a document from English to Swedish or to beta an already translated one from one of my teammates. (Team Swedish is a pretty big team for such a small language, and we use a two-beta system, which means every post we put out has been betaed twice.) So when I get a task, I look at it, do a quick time estimate and then make a mental slot in my schedule of when to do it. The deadlines (and possibility for extensions) vary depending on what type of task it is, and how long it is. When I sit down to do the work, it’s very straightforward. The documents we’re assigned are very structured and easy to work with. Hats off to the people doing the prep-work!

A few times per week, I also log onto the OTW chat system to see if a) a tag wrangler has encountered some Swedish tags they need help wrangling (rarely happens, but when it does it’s so much fun!) or b) Staff has an ad hoc translation/update that needs to be done quickly.

I’m also signed up to help out with translating Support tickets and Policy & Abuse tickets, but so far, none have come my way. I have a feeling most Swedes send in their tickets in English.

What made you decide to volunteer?

Not to sound overly dramatic, but in the fall of 2019 I was feeling very adrift and looking for a purpose (as one does, from time to time). I saw a post on Tumblr about the OTW looking for volunteers and thought that this could be a purpose. Giving back to the fannish community could be a purpose!

I’m still so excited I was picked to do this work!

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

...updating the Cheatsheet. No, the Cheatsheet (the team glossary where the language teams decide on how to translate fannish and OTW-related words/terms like ‘ship (verb)’ and ‘ship (noun)’ or ‘anti-circumvention provisions’) is a lifesaver! It is one of those things we translators love to hate, because some words/terms are very hard to translate in ways that make sense. Particularly, legal terms relating to a legal system that may not have an equivalence outside of the country where the law exists.

This does relate to my biggest challenge, though, or what I’ve struggled with the most, and that’s scrutinizing and reevaluating how I use both English and my native Swedish, especially when it comes to where the languages intersect. So many fandom terms only exist in English (for me). I learned these words and terms through English in English spaces, and finding ways to speak about them in Swedish has been difficult at times.

What fannish things do you like to do?

I mostly write and read fanfiction. And talk endlessly with friends who, for some reason, never grow tired of me even though some of us aren’t in the same fandoms anymore. Nothing feeds the plot bunnies as much as bouncing ideas with other fans. I’m very open about my fannish life outside of fandom, which has made me the go-to person for everyone at work when they need to have a fannish moment, even if I don’t have any/limited knowledge of the source material. It’s the best! I’ve learned so much about Star Wars, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Doctor Who, and James Bond over cups of coffee in the breakroom.

I also spend some time making sure the Swedish pages on Wikipedia for the OTW and AO3 are updated. (I still haven’t made a single edit on Fanlore, which I’m greatly ashamed of.)

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Akima Ras, who volunteers as a Translation volunteer for Team Persian.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

One of the missions of the OTW is to make fannish content and community more accessible for people around the world. By volunteering as a translator for Team Persian, and the Translation Committee as a whole, I believe that we’re helping to make everything feel easier and simpler to use. In the future, it can become a space that might feel closer to home for those who, for a variety of reasons, don’t or can’t live in their home countries anymore. Aside from that, I’m also a staffling for our Webs Committee, who fights WordPress alongside other Webs staff to maintain OTW’s website and tries to get it to behave when other committees need technical assistance.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

Due to my mostly nonexistent schedule, I don’t really have a typical week. When I actually manage to sit down unbothered behind my laptop, in the early hours of the morning, I tackle a variety of responsibilities based on my mood and how nigh the due date is. It’s usually the translation task I’m assigned, followed by doc managing ones collecting dust 90% of the time. That means preparing around three or so dozen docs for translation, which can sometimes seem like a daunting project to tackle. To mix things up sometimes, I check OTW’s main website and its relatives to see if they require updates, then switch to our internal task boards to do some housekeeping.

What made you decide to volunteer?

It seems like such a long time ago, [laughs], but when I first decided to volunteer, I actually noticed the recruitment post on AO3 for the very first time. I usually didn’t pay that part of the page much heed, and if I did, it was no more than a cursory glance, but for some reason, it caught my eye that time, and I clicked the link. That somehow led me to the Translation Committee world map, and I noticed that there are no peeps from my country nor any who translate from English to Persian.

That was the reason. The realization that it felt like giving back to the community that had given so much to me, in a way, came later. In the beginning, seeing that map and noticing that there was no team Persian somehow made me wonder if OTW would want to have their site translated to my mother tongue. I contacted our Volunteers & Recruitment Committee, I assume, asking if they would be interested in that, and to my utmost surprise— because there were no translator recruitments back then — they said yes. And the rest, as they say, is history.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

Actually, the experience has been so new, exciting, and rewarding that I can’t come up with a response for this one. I mean, I can talk about how difficult it is to find the equivalent of pinch-hitter (a term for a stand-in writer in challenges) in the Persian language (there are none); or I can talk about the untamable navigation menus of OTW’s website which, regardless of one’s tinkering method, remain three lines long and overflowing with random pages with long, long names. But it’s all part of volunteering for OTW.

P.S. In hindsight, maybe the latter can actually qualify as a challenge. Those hours and days that I believed that I had broken the site by fixing the ones for our three or so dozen languages were very stressful.

What fannish things do you like to do?

I’ve always loved stories and books, so reading fanfiction is a favorite pastime. I’m also an avid consumer of fanart on Tumblr and Deviant Art, and fanvids from the fandoms I’m interested in. That said, whenever my muses grace me with their presence, and real life allows, I write fics to give back to the fandom, appreciate other writers, give gifts to friends, and pen stories that I’d like to read.

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Mirissa, who volunteers as a Translation volunteer for Team Kyrgyz.

How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?

My role in the OTW community is just the same as the other translators. I translate news and other OTW documents to help the community grow and make the experience for other people more comfortable. When I applied to be a translator for the Kyrgyz language there was no Kyrgyz language on the list of the application form. I wasn’t extremely surprised, because this language is not very well known, but it really is similar to Kazakh. It’s funny how long it took me to realize that I was the only translator on the team.

What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?

My week as a volunteer isn't that unusual. Honestly, I am the type of person to procrastinate and do all the work at the last minute. But with my translation assignments, I take my time on them and try to make them the best way possible. I’m mostly on time, but sometimes I might face some technical issues, so my assignments might be overdue. Not only do I translate different documents, but since I am the only person on the Kyrgyz language team I also act as a beta.

What made you decide to volunteer?

I’ve been reading fanfics on AO3 for a long time after finding a really well-written work 3 years ago. As I got signed up for it and went through news posts I noticed a post saying that they needed translators. I got really interested in it and filled in the application form. At first I didn’t know which language team I should volunteer for, because I know Russian pretty decently as well, so it took me some time to figure out that I wanted to share my native language with the community.

What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?

In the beginning, I was trying my best to get used to the system of how this role worked. Eventually, I got used to everything until the time to translate the membership drives came. I did understand the condition to finish it in 5 days, so I thought “Why not do it?” Maybe I had some challenges because the language I’m translating into might be a bit confusing for non-native speakers. So, I had to confirm something with the staff. I’m glad it all turned out well in the end.

What fannish things do you like to do?

I do not really stand out in the area of fannish stuff. Just like everyone, I do read fanfics and I also write my own fanfics on AO3. Well, I also do aesthetic journaling, but not that often since it really does take me a lot of time. I also watch videos of my favorite anime and Japanese voice actors, who doesn’t do that? I think that’s all I do as a fan (I’m thinking I sound really boring, don’t I?).

Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.