Who we are
The Translation committee is an all-volunteer team with members from all over the world. Our main responsibility is to make content from the OTW and its projects accessible to fans who don’t speak English. We also help other OTW committees communicate with non-English-speaking fans and users.
Internally, the committee is divided into translators and volunteer managers. Translators work in language teams; they create and proofread translated texts. Volunteer managers coordinate the language teams and take care of administrative tasks surrounding translation work, such as making and uploading documents, tracking deadlines, interviewing potential translators, and training new volunteers.
We have 46 language teams of varying sizes: Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, European Portuguese, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kyrgyz, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Welsh. We’re always on the lookout for opportunities to start new language teams!
Our work
The Translation committee translates material for the OTW and its projects, including the organization’s main site and the the Archive of Our Own (AO3) FAQs. We also work on news and notices for OTW projects, such as Open Doors import announcements, AO3 news posts, and OTW membership drives.
Additionally, we collaborate with the AO3 Policy & Abuse and Support teams to translate user messages and requests, and help answer non-English comments on public posts.
Contact us
If you want to learn more about the work of the Translation committee, our teams, or volunteering with us, or if you have any questions, please contact us—we will be happy to hear from you.
Where we are
Here’s a map showing the concentration of OTW Translation members around the world as of October 2021, with countries with more members shaded darker. (Only members who were willing to appear on the map have been included.) The map shows people’s nationality or residence status, depending on what each volunteer chose to use.