1.1 Methodology and structure

This thesis will be divided into two parts. The theoretical part will briefly discuss the terminology and history of fanfiction, focusing on defining fanfiction as an object of academic studies and preparing the ground for setting the year 2000 as the symbolic milestone around which the rest of the thesis structure will be built, and touching upon the duality of fanfiction writing and fanfiction translating, which will be important throughout the thesis, as it will provide the basic background against which the data from the practical section will be interpreted and some initial hypotheses will be tested. Current trends concerning the ethical dimension of fan research will also be mentioned.

The main part will consist of three chapters. The first one will examine fanfiction writing and translating in the Czech Republic before 2000 (or pre-Harry Potter), the second will focus on the era from 2000 onwards, both with the ambition to introduce the fanfiction translation environment through some of its key players and contributors (individuals, archives and other community sites). The third chapter will analyse an online questionnaire that was distributed among the Czech and Slovak fanfiction translators, together with a more detailed discussion on some selected topics associated with the individual questions. Each of these chapters should provide a different insight into the world of fanfiction translation.

A note on the inclusion of the Slovak language: as has been mentioned, today the fanfiction communities are, to some extent, merged (with Slovak fanfiction authors publishing on the “Czech” sites and vice versa), but as the author of the thesis is Czech, some of the chapters (notably the historical overview and the chapter on the early, pre-Harry Potter period) will focus almost exclusively on the Czech fan space and Czech resources. It is legitimate to assume that the main milestones will not differ significantly.

2. Theoretical part

2.1 What is fanfiction translation?

According to Wikipedia, fanfiction is “fiction about characters or settings from an original work of fiction, created by fans of that work rather than by its creator.” ⁸ While that’s certainly true, fanfiction in reality is a much broader, and at the same time more complex term, than what this most frequent usage, as summarized in the above definition, would lead many people to believe. Any attempt at creating an accurate, all-encompassing definition struggles with what, upon taking a closer look, turns out to be a complex literary and social phenomenon with many facets and a long history.

In order to define what fanfiction is for the purpose of this thesis, or in other words, in order to understand what those fans, who are herein called “fanfiction translators”, translate, an introductory chapter of The Fanfiction Reader titled “Five Things That Fanfiction Is, And One It Isn’t” (Coppa, 2017) will be used. In it, Coppa presents five (or six) possible approaches to defining fanfiction, as expressed by several frequently cited scholarly definitions (p. 2–16). Below, each approach will be briefly considered in terms of its usefulness and suitability for developing further arguments in this thesis.

1. “Fanfiction is fiction created outside of the literary marketplace”

This line of definition accentuates the amateur or non-professional nature of fanfiction, i.e. fiction that is not created with the intention of being published and therefore does not imply any requirements regarding quality or originality. While it’s certainly a very broad definition, it brings forward several key aspects of fanfiction that will also play a role in this thesis, notably the concept of quality: how is it assured and if it’s important for the community at all. It is also in this section where Coppa suggests fanfiction is a form of “self-expression”, and one of the minor questions this thesis would like to explore is whether fanfiction translation, in spite of being conducted in a different creative mode than fanfiction writing, can also be considered a form of “self-expression” by the translators.

This area also opens the question of whether fanfiction translation (or by extension, any form of amateur translation) functions as a training ground for professional career, as there have already been examples of this being true in the case fanfiction writing.

A terminological note should be added at this point to state that the expressions “amateur”, “non-professional” or “fan”, in reference to translation, will be used interchangeably in this thesis, unless pointed out otherwise.

2. “Fanfiction is fiction that rewrites and transforms other stories”

This approach allows Coppa to present another group of fanfiction definitions to highlight the fact that fanfiction is part of a long literary and storytelling tradition that draws back to the times when sharing and retelling stories within a community was considered a perfectly natural, “human” thing to do, and draws an interesting comparison with theatre plays, which maintain their relevancy in the repertoire as long as they are a source of new meanings and new connections, with the potential to show us our current world in a different light.

Derecho’s (2006) inquiry into the history of transformative and derivative works, for which she suggests to use the term “archontic,” places fanfiction within the tradition of genres for “writers who belong to ‘cultures of the subordinate,‘ including women, colonial subjects, and ethnic minorities” (p. 71). This is consistent with the line of argument that highlights the subversive character of fanfiction, which, as articulated by many scholars in the past (Jenkins, 1992; Lamb & Veith, 1986/2014; Derecho, 2006), has been used by women as a creative tool to challenge, through the power of reimagining and retelling, existing societal norms and norms prevalent in the content produced by global media corporations.

Fanfiction translators, by sharing other fanfiction authors’ works, contribute to and participate in this process. It remains a matter of individual translators’ motivation, whether and to what extent their selection of concrete fanfiction authors to translate and specific fanfiction works to promote is part of their broader statement of values, going beyond just the simple “liking” of their selected fanfiction story.

3. “Fanfiction is fiction that rewrites and transforms stories currently owned by others”

This is a one of the narrower possible approaches, shifting attention to not only the legal issues surrounding the fanfiction activities, but in a broader light to the relationship between the fan and the official author and in yet broader light to the concept of ownership itself⁹.

The legal issues are real, as evidenced by a number of authors who take a strict stance against fanfiction based on their works. In the sub-space of fanfiction translation, this angle is to some extent relevant to the individual translators’ practices and site policies around asking the authors for permission to translate their story and beyond that, to the many aspects of the fanfiction translator-author relationship. Even though in the case of fanfiction translation, both the fanfiction author and the translator are playing in someone else’s world, there are certain netiquette expectations regarding the details of their “working” relationship.

4. “Fanfiction is fiction written within and to the standards of a particularly fannish community”

This approach accentuates the crucial community aspect of fanfiction writing, which, for some scholars, is at the very core of the fanfiction activity. Coppa cites a professional and fanfiction writer Naomi Novik, who says: “Fanfiction is not just written from one single person, speaking to an audience; rather, the stories are written within, from and for a community.”

This angle is very relevant to fanfiction translation as the act of sharing other fans’ stories is of course absolutely central to what fanfiction translators do, perhaps even more so, as the stories they promote and share through translating are already a reimagining of other original works.

This sub-section of Coppa’s introductory chapter also contains the (within the scholarly community) famous banquet metaphor, which originally appeared in an essay “Slash Fiction is Like a Banquet “¹⁰ and could be very useful for describing the practice of fanfiction translation from the community perspective. While the metaphor was, as Coppa explains, originally used to criticise a certain level of homogenization within the fandom, she decided to use it in a different way, stating that “fanfiction is a banquet that fans make together with everyone cooking and the diners prized as much as cooks” (p. 10). This perspective would blur the hierarchical line between the fanfiction author and the translator, making everyone “cooks” who prepare dinner for everyone else.

Even more striking and fitting for our purpose is the perspective of the “gift culture.” Coppa notes that very often, fanfiction is written and perceived as a gift or as a form of thank you. This is definitely something the fanfiction translators can, in theory, excel at, as translating stories for fans who possibly cannot enjoy them in their original language is naturally part of their “job description”.

5. “Fanfiction is speculative fiction about character rather than about the world”

This approach focuses even more on the specific qualities of fanfiction, helping to separate it from other genres, in this case notably from science fiction. Coppa observes that while science fiction tends to be more interested in the world and in ideas, fanfiction is interested in the characters, their background, experiences and relationships. The reason science fiction was chosen for this comparison is because as a genre, it had a similarly low status in the past, and because the origins of modern fanfiction are linked to the Star Trek series and the Star Trek fanzines¹¹. This distinction isn’t particularly useful for any inquiry into the area of fanfiction translation, but will play a minor role in one of the following chapters.