Czech fanfiction and fanfiction translation after 2000
This chapter will more closely examine the recent and current online fanfiction space with the aim to not only get a general idea of the state of things with regard to Czech/Slovak fanfiction translation, but also to identify how the fanfiction translation practice is incorporated and mirrored in various technological structures of fanfiction related websites, in accordance with for example Fathallah (2017) stating that “the technological and social codes that govern fanfiction archives and community spaces must be considered as shaping factors of discourse”. Before examining the Czech/Slovak online fanfiction environment, a closer look needs to be taken at the largest multi-fandom international fanfiction archives, Fanfiction.net and Archives of Our Own.
The largest archive Fanfiction.net, currently hosting millions of stories with open access without having to sign up for a profile, frequently cited as one of the most popular archives and one that helped fuel the initial boom of fanfiction (Herzing, 2005; Evans, 2006), was founded in 1998. Its stories are currently organized in several category layers – the first dividing line being between fanfiction (stories set in one universe) and crossovers (stories interconnecting more than one universe, for example stories with characters from one movie meeting characters from another movie), the second between different media (stories based on books, movies, videogames, theatre plays etc.) and lastly between individual fandoms. Each story must be marked based on the site’s rating system (age rating). Stories can then be further classified and searched for based on other characteristics such as genre, main characters or language. Even though the site accepts stories written in other languages (and currently supports 42 languages, including Czech and Slovak), it doesn’t have a separate category for translations and doesn’t have a tag (or a keywords) system to specifically mark stories as translations. Translations can only be described as such by their translators in the summary or in the body of the text, which means the only way to find out the rough number of Czech or Slovak translations is to manually search for stories that contain the Czech or Slovak word for “translation” (and its variants) in the summary or in the actual text, or manually search for stories with the English word “translation” in the summary (in case the translators decided to write an English summary) and then only filter out Czech or Slovak stories.
This method reveals there are currently 169 Czech or Slovak translated stories and 38 translators, with the most frequent fandom being Harry Potter (approx. 119 translated stories, which is significantly more than a half), the other fandoms having less than 10 stories each, and the story with the oldest date of publication seems to have been posted in 2005. These numbers might not be accurate due to some translations not being marked as such, which means they don’t come up in search results, and due to stories having been deleted over time.
Fanfiction.net is extremely easy to navigate but offers no direct support for users in terms of enabling them to tag their stories as translations or link them to the original.
Archives of Our Own (also abbreviated AO3) is a younger archive founded in 2007 by a non-profit “Organization for Transformative Works” (OTW) with the aim to “serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms.”44 Unlike Fanfiction.net, which has adopted strict content policies over the many years of its existence, banning for example fanfiction based on real persons45 and, in a series of unpopular steps, content rated as Adult only (NC-17)46, AO3’s self-declared mission is to promote and build on the idea of inclusiveness through an open-access, open-source model47, allowing thus for fanworks of all types to be posted on their site, including real-person fanfiction and stories with explicit mature content, with exceptions in accordance with applicable law.
AO3 actively caters for the needs of its non-native English users, currently supports 64 languages (including a few fictional ones) and has large teams of volunteers systematically localizing many of the key documents, sections and blog posts on the AO3 and OTW sites into a large number of languages. The archive also has quite a unique system that enables its users to mark their stories as a translation and even link them to the original story and author.
As can be seen in the release notes documenting various changes and tweaks to the site over the course of its development, this system evolved through several iterations48. In its current version, the story can be marked as a translation in a special section of the story settings dedicated to declaring an “association”, whether it’s with another story, with a collection (for example in the case of stories that were created as part of a writing challenge) or with another user (when the story is meant as a gift). Here, translations are grouped together with “remixes”, podfics (recordings of stories read aloud) and stories that were directly inspired by other fanworks (see Figure 1). Once the story is marked as part of this group, the user can insert a link to the original story, including its author and title, select their story’s language and then clearly tag the story as an actual translation.
Figure 1
Completing this process will then automatically attach a note to the story’s summary, informing the readers that this story is a translation and creating an automatic clickable link to the original (See Figure 2).
Figure 2
The AO3 team’s decision to include translations in the group of works characterized as having an association with another work, as opposed to creating a separate category for translations from the start, was possibly driven by technical reasoning, as the current system is simple and the linking feature is easily available to be used with a wider category of stories without the user interface becoming bloated, but can also be interpreted as an (unintended) statement regarding the role of the translation activities within the fanfiction fandom. Here, translation as a practice is not that strictly separated from the writing practices but rather fits in the wider definition of fanfiction as storytelling inspired by other stories and being shared for the benefit of everyone, in line with the banquet metaphor mentioned in Chapter 2.
Even though AO3 might be considered the young and progressive archive, the number of Czech/Slovak translations seems to be notably lower than that on Fanfiction.net. The system outlined above is unfortunately not interconnected with the search function and so in order to search for the Czech and Slovak translations, a similar method as in the case of Fanfiction.net has to be adopted, which means manually searching for stories that include the Czech or Slovak word for “translation” in their summary. AO3 allows its users to use an unlimited number of additional tags – keywords that can be attached to each story to make it easy to look for, but not all translators use this opportunity to tag their stories as translations.
The manual search method reveals the number of Czech and Slovak translations on AO3 to be at least 107, by at least 30 different translators (some publishing on Fanfiction.net as well), with the Harry Potter fandom being much less dominant than on Fanfiction.net (approx. 44 stories, which is less than a half) and with the Sherlock – BBC television series fandom being a successful runner-up (with approx. 20 translations). The story with the oldest publication date is from the year 2012, but there are some translations published in 2018 that according to their summary were translated more than 10 years ago, which shows that older works are still being added today.
The Wattpad application, the third large international archive site, will not be analysed in detail here. While some fan sources49 cautiously estimate it to be the largest archive in terms of the number of hosted stories alone, fanfiction is only one of several categories of stories it hosts and its only other classification is conducted through a very loose and completely voluntary tagging system, which, together with a lack of any advanced search function, makes collecting any relevant data very difficult.
These rather crude numbers’ almost exclusive purpose is to show that there are Czech and Slovak fan translators spontaneously publishing on the world’s largest archive sites and that their activity mirrors some vaguely observed or estimated worldwide trends, for example the dominance of the Fanfiction.net archive, popularity of the Harry Potter fandom or relative to that the success of the Sherlock BBC fandom on AO350.
Shifting the attention to the Czech/Slovak online fan space, it’s important to begin with saying there are no large multi-fandom archives. The rest of this chapter will thus focus on a few selected websites to illustrate the place of fanfiction translation within the Czech fanfiction fandom, accentuating the community factor. The absolute majority of sites hosting or discussing fanfiction stories, whether original or translated, especially small fandom-specific archives, individual blogs and personal pages run by dedicated fans, authors and fan translators, together forming the vast, varied and diverse web that is the fanfiction space, will inevitably be omitted, which doesn’t mean they are any less relevant. There are no real data available as to the fragmentation of the online fanfiction space, with regard to specific fandoms or groups being less likely to meet and interact, apart from potential anecdotal or insider knowledge. Dunčová (2016) for example posits that Czech fanfiction inspired by the popular television series Game of Thrones is mostly only published on individual blogs, as opposed to online archives (with only 4 Czech Game of Thrones fanfiction stories found in the large international archives, the statement seems accurate).
When looking for multi-fandom projects within the Czech fanfiction space, one has to start with mentioning Společnost pro osvětu spisovatelů (Writers Education Society, usually just abbreviated as SOS)51, founded possibly around 200552. This group of fanfiction authors and fans have been organizing or providing support for a number of activities and projects that helped shape the Czech fanfiction scene on a superfandom level through promoting fanfiction, publishing and translating theoretical articles and running various fanfiction writing challenges, the most popular of which “Duben Měsíc Drabble” (April, the month of drabbles53), attracts close to two hundred participants each year. SOS also helped organize a fanfiction translation challenge with the title “Překladatelova rukavice” (Translator’s gauntlet).
The self-declared mission of Překladatelova rukavice was to test one’s skills and participate in a discussion on specific solutions and translation related issues in a friendly, supportive environment54. There were four rounds of the challenge held in years 2006–2007, with the highest number of participants being twelve55 in the third round.
While SOS and its associated projects represent an example of community activities planned and organized by a particular group of fans for other fans, there are also fanfiction sites or projects whose purpose is accomplished through content being generated solely by the users, and where translation may or may not be part of the initial design.
Fitting this description, Fanfiction čtenářský deník (Fanfiction Reader’s Journal)56, or just FFDeník, is a Czech website founded in 2009 with the aim to serve as a database of story recommendations, written by the users, currently hosting 6101 stories57, based on 92 fandoms in total, the top five being Harry Potter, The Professionals, Lord of the Rings, Sherlock – BBC and Star Trek, which have all been mentioned over the course of this thesis as significant in one way or another. Upon signing up, users can write recommendations of stories they have read, as long as the story is publicly available online, in the form of separate entries complete with full description, link and basic classification such as age rating, genre or length and additional keywords to allow other users to search based on their preferred criteria. The system distinguishes between original fanfiction and translation, which means translated stories are entered under the nickname of both the author and translator, creating thus a separate database of fanfiction translators linked to their translated stories.
The search function doesn’t allow extracting the exact number of translated recommended stories, but allows manual counting of separate entries for “translators”, of which there are 180. This total consists not just of individual translators but also of translation teams in the case of larger group translation projects, so one translator can be included in several entries. What’s worth noting is that as per the site rules, authors aren’t allowed to self-promote by recommending their own stories, but translators can recommend stories they have translated.
The site’s concept is a reverse variation on common “list your criteria” type of online discussion topics, where users post exact characteristics of a story they’d like to find and other users respond with their recommendations58, or simply a variation on the recommendation concept in general, but is unique in that it’s multi-fandom and acknowledges translations as a separate category.
The Daily Slash59 is a multi-fandom website dedicated to promoting a specific genre of fanfiction – slash60. It operates as a news portal, where users can, among other things, send recommendations or notifications of new or updated slash stories through filling out a form. The site recognizes translation as a separate category and the notification form has a separate text box for a translator’s name. Users can also use a similar form to suggest stories for translation.
The few above examples, while they can hardly capture the diverse reality of the online fanfiction space, illustrate quite successfully that there is interest in translating, interest in translated stories, that users acknowledge and express this interest by participating in a whole network of activities and that various fanfiction community websites incorporate the translation category as part of their design (either by default, or added over time). This is an important factor when examining the online fanfiction space for example through the lens of the concepts of cultural or subcultural capital. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital has been adopted by a number of fan studies scholars to describe and interpret the hierarchical structures of fandom, the fans’ place within these structures and their motivation as an analogy to accumulating and investing capital in an economy (for example Fiske, 1992; Thornton, 1996 as cited by Kudláč, 2016). Švelch (2011) specifically applied the concept of cultural and social capital to explain motivations for fan translating with the example of fan translation of Game of Thrones television series subtitles as a case study. If we analogically interpret fanfiction translation as a potential tool to accumulate subculture capital, which is a term coined by Thornton (1996) in reference to the social standing and reputation within the fandom, the relevance of a system enabling the translators to mark their work as a translation and attach their name or nickname to it, while at the same time allowing other users to refer to these works using both the translators’ and author’s nicknames as identification, becomes even more evident. This also connects back to the idea of the gift culture as mentioned in one of the fanfiction definitions in Chapter 2, regardless of whether the translator’s gift is creation or providing access. Chin (2010) argues that even within fandom, gifting is inseparable from reciprocity and social status within the fan network again serves as the main currency.
Discussion of the fanfiction translators’ motivation in relation to fandom reputation will again come in to play during the questionnaire analysis but the focus will now shift back to the team and community aspects.
Originally Slovak fanfiction archive hpkizi.sk61 is a Harry Potter-only, fanfiction translation exclusive website, now hosting more than 900 Czech and Slovak translated stories62. It represents the category of moderated archives63 with its own sets of rules regarding translation submission and publication. As can be concluded from various sections on the site and the associated article on the Czech fan Wikia site Fanpolis64, hpkizi.sk was founded in 2008 by an individual person and has over the years been maintained and kept alive by a Czech and Slovak team of dedicated fans and fan translators, many of whom still translate but also provide beta-reading services for other translations. Jedi Land from the previous chapter operated on similar principles, albeit on a significantly smaller scale.
Hpkizi.sk uses several levels of quality control. Submissions by new translators are evaluated by the site team. Once the user is accepted into the wider team of translators, they can post their stories freely but are still expected to cooperate with a beta reader and abide by rules that can be summarized as: “The translation has to be accurate and correct in terms of grammar and style. Severe errors and translation inaccuracies as well as literal translation ‘like from a software translator’ are not tolerated. If the translator is unsure as to whether their translation is correct, they can have the story beta-read = checked by another person, i.e. the beta reader.”65 As seen, the rules are related both to the target language (Czech or Slovak) norms and to translation equivalency.
Submission rules pertaining to quality are common on moderated fanfiction archives but the exact practices might vary and in general, cooperation with a beta reader can be considered a norm, a matter of personal principles, simply just “nice to have”, or sometimes, fan writers may not even know it exists. While there is some limited scholarship on the subject of beta-reading practices in the fanfiction environment (Karpovich, 2006), it deals with fanfiction writing, not translating. Some of its conclusions or assertions could, however, apply to beta-reading practices in fanfiction translation, too. With regard to the community aspects, Karpovich for example states that “dialogues between the fan writers and their betas help to maintain personal links within the community” (p. 174). The online communication between the users on Hpkizi.sk as well as several responses to the questionnaire in the next chapter seem to attest to that. Of no les importance is the role of beta-reading as what Karpovich calls “initiation into fan practice” (p. 183), which factors in the dynamics between the experienced beta readers and new fan writers.
Again, Hpkizi.sk provides an excellent example. One of their projects, “Online preklady” (Online translations)66, also sometimes referred to as “Online překlady bez závazků” (Online trannslations with no obligations), is a unique community feature with a custom created technical solution that allows anyone to join in a translation of a particular story and contribute as per their individual skills, availability or interest by translating any amount of words they feel like. Stories included in this project are divided into separate paragraphs and the translators enter their suggestions for the translation online, paragraph by paragraph. The beta reader or admin assigned to each story regularly checks on the quality and consistency, leaving comments where necessary. Each contributing translator has their name mentioned in the chapter they helped to translate.
As such, it’s an example of an interesting and unique fusion of fanfiction and crowdfunded or collaborative translation. Here it needs to be pointed out that the Czech fanfiction space is quite rich on large collaborative translation projects. “Harry Potter a okultní had”67 a “Rok jako žádný jiný”68 (with hundreds of translated pages)69 are among the most famous ones and seem to be associated to some extent with some members of Hpkizi.sk. Also rather well known are unofficial fan translations of the Harry Potter books (Ešnerová, 2012). It could be argued though that even within the context of other collaborative translation, the “educative” or “fan initiation” aspect of the “Online preklady” project is distinct and self-declared, as per their introductory note: “This is a space for those who would like to contribute to the translation of stories at hpkizi.sk with no obligations, to learn something or just test their level of English knowledge.”70
This chapter, similarly to the previous one, attempted to illustrate the complex reality of the online fanfiction translation space using examples of various fanfiction related websites or projects, while at the same time addressing several topics outlined in the introduction. The following questionnaire analysis will explore these themes on a more detailed level.