InsaneJournal

I’m well aware that translation is a more appreciated and documented art in non-Anglophone countries, where the amount of books translated every year is obviously bigger, especially in the narrative section. It’s only normal for Italian young people to discuss about the adaptation of their favourite (American) TV series, or book, or musical, and so on. Of course it’s also rather rare for an American/British teenager to rack his/her brain over the latest Niccolò Ammaniti’s or a random Kommissar Rex’s episode’s translation. This linguistic colonisation is everywhere, because non-Anglophone young and older people are exposed to a lot of content in English, be it music, ads, movies, etc. As a consequence, translators sometimes feel alone, as if their job is underestimated – when taken into account at all. I guess this happens to professional as well as amateur translators, but the first ones can find solace in recognition and financial income. This is the ultimate difference: I translate fan fics for free. That’s normal, since fandom is based on this, but it’s also true that re-writing Underwater Light in Italian is neither the consequence of a personal need nor the product of an explosion of narrative creativity, but rather the humble proof of devotion to an author whose works I’d like everyone to read.

Legend has it that all translators know perfectly the source language – English, in this case. The truth is that, unless the source text isn’t highly complex, there’s no structure that can’t be translated with the help of a good dictionary and some creativity. Of course knowing English at an excellent level helps much and is desirable, but what is absolutely necessary to be a good translator is the complete mastery of one’s mother tongue – or of the target language, which is frankly more than can be said for 70% of Italian fan writers and fan translators.
Having established that translators from English can’t be expected to be as fluent in English as they are in their mother language, let’s describe the process in further details. As I said before, translating a fan fic is an act of sheer altruism. No one will ever understand the joy of translating an apparently untranslatable pun, neither the author nor the readers who don’t know the original text. God, only a translator can understand where it all comes from. At first it’s just a game of “let’s see how this would sound in my language”; after months of exercise it becomes something more.
It’s what Susanna Basso (the Italian translator of –among others – Ian McEwan) calls “loss of innocence”: it’s impossible for translators to read something in English without wondering how it could be conveyed in their language; at the same time it’s impossible to enjoy translated books, because the source language text remains visible and unbearably intrusive even when it’s been transformed by mediocre translators.
This kind of professional bias combined with the desire to sponsor my favourite fan fics, is what makes me ask/beg authors to let me work on their stories.

While my first experiments in this sense were carried on without help, I’ve been working with a beta (valeneri on lj) for almost a year. She helps me making the target text more fluent, more correct, more Italian. The stories I and Vale work on are usually fan fics we both adore, which means that apart from judging each linguistic structure with Southern and Northern regional varieties in mind, we get to scrutinize our favourite stories! I’ve never translated anything at a professional level - although I must admit that I and my fellow fan translators take things much too seriously for our own good - thus I don’t know whether the translator/editor relationship is this informal and open, but I hope it is ‘cause it makes things much more funny.
What I really love about translating fan fics is that it gives me the opportunity to recognise the author in the littlest details. I recognise Amanuensis for her never-ending metaphorical spirals, Sansa for the immense sensibility of her characters and for the suspended beauty of her plots, Maya for her almost nonsense dialogues and the puzzling lines that hide despair behind irony. It’s a bit embarrassing to know that those writers don’t know anything about me; it seems unfair when I know so well their communicative habits. I’ll quote Susanna Basso one more time: the relationship between author and translator is totally unbalanced.

Looking at the question from the opposite point of view, I can understand that it’s difficult for a fan fic author to entrust a perfect stranger with the task of working on something that cost hours, days, months of efforts and creativity. Especially when there’s no possibility to check the quality of the result – when there’s a result: fan fics translators are known for their mysterious disappearances. The only advice I can give is to trust one’s instinct by bearing in mind that the reliability of a translator can be seen in his/her enthusiasm and in the regularity of updates about his/her work.

To sum up, translating fan fics is one of the things I love doing and I’m ready to sacrifice some of my free time if that means supporting an author I believe in. Authors, care about your translators! Readers, please, never think that a translator’s task is to “steal” the author’s popularity by replacing him/her!