Agnieszka

Did you miss me? I knew you missed me!
Look at this! This is an update of all things ME! (I might be tired and I still have a lot of writing to do)

ANYway. Heres what happened lately.

Translation
Work continues. There are some developments which I don't want to talk about yet, but I'm very excited.
I managed to lure in two new staffers into our fold, which leaves me pretty excited. I hope we'll be able to go into 2013 with a lot of active and enthusiastic people, so that my world domination plan moves forward. There is a lot to do and I clearly need minions :)
We also (finally) managed to send out the newsletters for translators. It was a long and painful process. If we're lucky we'll be able to send out another one before the year's end.
The newsletter is important because among other things, it asks the translator about their preferred communication platform. Once we get enough voices on this we'll be able to concentrate on community building. Are you excited? because I am.

Fanlore
After taking a month-long break from it, I went back and started on Fanlore today. My biggest problem is getting over my mental block. Sometimes I just want to add one sentence or two, or point out something I find interesting. But more often than not, the page I would add that sentence to doesn't exist and I don't want to create a whole new page just to add that one insight.

I know that fanlore people will tell me it's okay and I can do that (or, at least, I assume they'd say that), but creating a brand new page for Chibs (Sons of Anarchy) just to say there's an ongoing argument among fanfic writers where one faction writes his accent in dialogues and the other argues it's stupid and makes it more difficult to read fic doesn't seem very professional.

As a result I don't make as many additions as I'd like to and it sucks. I know, I know. Woe is me.

NaNoWriMo
I'm doing NaNo this year with two of my friends. It's already insane, but I got a desktop version of Write or Die and that combined with my Scrivener really gets me writing. Sure I';m a little behind on the wordcount, but I'm still getting a lot words down. So, you know, keep your fingers crossed for me.

Primeval
So I watched the first episode of Primeval:New World, which of course made me rewatch all five seasons of the original Primeval I have on DVD. I miss Becker. I miss Connor. I miss long, good fics. I finished season 2 today (in between OTW work, writing and procrastinating)

2 hours later
I went on Tumlr to give you some primeval gifs. But I got distracted.



so you don't feel cheated as I spent hours staring at pretties and you got this post instead.

You would not believe how many hours it took me to draft this post. Mostly it's due to the fact that I have major FEELINGS about Translation and the translation process.

Let me give you some introduction:

You see, the problem with translation is that it doesn't have shiny ticky boxes, it doesn't have simple solutions and it can't, for the most part, be automated. Anyone who tried to translate bigger texts in Google Translator knows how bad of an idea that is.

That means that we have to relay on the volunteers to translate any content. Unfortunately translating is not a very glamorous process and most of the time it's a solitary task.

Because we have a very strict beta rule (no text goes live without a second pair of eyes checking it over, meaning every translation needs to be betad) and very small number of volunteers per language, it can take weeks if not months in some cases to see the finished translation going online.

If you look at the main tw.org website you can see how much material there is to translate. We can pretty much keep our translators busy all year long and still have stuff that needs translating, translations that need to be updated because the English version changed etc.

On to the problem:

Translating website content (or content of any kind) is very much like writing a fic, translating a fic or recording a podfic. The process itself is slow and unglamorous and something you need to do youself if you want to see results. So translators, as they translate or beta content, are very much on their own. Often their only point of contact is a liaison with the committee.

The workload and the lack of community means that our translators are either not as active as we'd like or they burn out quickly and we lose them forever. Or they just lose the interest.

As a committee, we try to keep the volunteers engaged as liaisons, using the tools we are given like the mailing list and office hours in campfire (although, I do have to admit that 2012 was a very bad year with a lot of staff changes and we are only now getting back into the swing) but those just don't seem to be working. The internal forum didn't really catch on with the translators and for a while we were also using Basecamp, but that didn't work out either.

So building a community that would help make translators feel like a part of a bigger group and help engage them and support them is one of the problems right now.

Another problem is a simple numbers game.

We simply don't have enough people in enough language teams to provide timely translations and support ad hoc translations for other committees. And to be perfectly honest if VolCom opened recruitment tomorrow and we got a huge influx on new people, we probably (as a committee) wouldn't be able to support them.

OTW grew a lot these past years and the needs for translations/translators are different (and there are much more of them) than they were when our processes were being set up. So before we can advertise and ask people to come translate stuff, we need to modify the processes.

Which means we arrive to the next problem.

For most part, translators aren't very tech savvy, at least that's been my experience so far. There is a lot of resistance from our translators when it comes to using the tools that we use (the translation priority chart and translation tools on the website, GQueues to keep track of what is being translated and what stage it's at and even GDocs) so maybe we need to find an easier, more straightforward solutions that our volunteers would be more comfortable with.

All the problems that I listed have solutions of course, but it will take time and effort to find the best ones and implement them. It's a slow process. And as a committee we are heading in the diretion of getting things done.

So, why am I writing about all this?

Ever since I joined the org as a member and a staffer, there has been a lot of conversation about how internationalization and outreach is important. And the policies and changes in the way the decisions are made is a huge and important part of making the org more inclusive and welcoming to non-English fans. I&O committee is doing great and amazing things and I feel like the org is going in the right direction.

But I have to wornder, how many people actually realize that policies and decision making and inclusive thinking can only take us so far. At some point we will have to start doing the nitty gritty work of actually translating the content and trying to reach out in native languages to fans who don't feel comfortable using English as lingua franca.

Right now we have 35 translator volunteers. Some of them inactive, some of them on hiatus and some of them unable to get their language version going because they don't have a beta.

So the processes are flawed. Translating itself isn't glamorous and in some language cases it's not even easy. Translators dont' get much feedback on their work and they don't get kudos. There is too much to do and not enough people willing to do it.

I'm not saying volunteer as a translator. I realize it's not for everybody and many fans just like working on the shiny things. But if you speak a language other than English and it so happens that language is live on the main OTW website, go check out the translations and maybe send our translators a note saying they are doing a good job. They need all the love.

I will go now. I feel strangely exposed and vulnerable and protective of my committee and my volunteers after writing all this.

Here's a fun fact bout me: I'm a freelance writer and I work from home. I get paid based on an hourly rate which means I try to track my activities every moment of every day. It doesn't always happen and the time report I check doesn't account for everything (like watching TV shows and Tumblr) but nonetheless Toggl is my friend.

Why am I mentioning this? Other than to share something with the Internetz, every Sunday I check my time report on Toggl to see how the week went and how much time I spent on various tasks/activities and to see what could be improved as far as my productivity goes.

I could spend less time on Tumblr, for starters.
Funny how it's so much easier to watch less shows than to give up Tumblr.
Hell, I managed to give up LJ completely and switch to DW where I know way less people.
But Tumblr doesn't want to let go. help?

And today I checked my time report as usual and it hit me.

Catching up with my OTW duties and taking over as chair of Translation took a lot of time. Since Sept 1 I spent 18 hours doing OTW work (14 this week only).

And that doesn't account for those 5 hours I spent at the end of August cleaning up Teen Wolf tags

( Cut for Tag Wrangling side note )

I'm sure you're suspecting that I will follow this report with a lot of complaining and stuff. After all, it's 18 hours I could've spent reading fic or watching those TV shows I'm so far behind.

But the thing is: my job didn't suffer because of this additional work load.
Neither did my enthusiasm.

I spent 18 hours wrangling tags, sending emails, catching up on work done during my hiatus, crafting to-do lists and plans and outlines for docs I want to prepare.

And it was awesome.

It will probably sound weird to you, but I honestly enjoy administrative tasks. I love coordinating shit and coordinating people. I love making spreadsheets in Excel and outlining activities. More importantly, I think I'm good at it. (Feel free to disabuse me of this notion if you disagree)

The only reason why I had to go on hiatus is that I had to prioritize my RL because of big changes that were happening that I had to stay on top of. Now that everything's fixed I can go back to the stuff I love.

Here's a semi-complete list of stuff I'm excited about:

• Taking on Freeforms in Teen Wolf fandom (I won't be able to reign them in? I won't be able? Challenge accepted, Teen Wolf fandom!)


• Continue taking over stuff as chair of Translation - there's still a lot that happened and a lot that I have questions about. But that's a matter of few emails and maybe a GTalk chat


• Elections! - our language teams will be attempting to translate some stuff for the upcoming Elections so many fans/members who don't speak English or don't feel comfortable using English will be able to participate and stay informed.

The big problem here is the fact that most of our language teams are small and can't handle translating a lot of material that has a very tight schedule. It's something Translation committee needs to work on and we need to figure out how to encourage people to help out with translating OTW content. (Planning - another thing I'm excited about!)

And with that, I shall go and reward myself with an episode of Criminal Minds (I've been very productive this week). I keep rewatching older episodes and squeeing at Morgan/Garcia goodness.