starfishstar

Someone asking to translate something of mine into another language will never not be about the coolest thing I can imagine! And in this case, it's four stories: translations of the three short fics in my "Golden, Ripe and Rotten" series (about young Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald), plus "Sharp Lightning against a Dangerous Sky" (the Dumbledore/Grindelwald duel).

This is a particularly nice translation – I mean, not that I can actually read it in Chinese myself, but I can see that the translator even put in footnotes explaining different linguistic and cultural things to a non-English-speaking readership, which as a language nerd and a translator myself, I think is really cool.

Here are the translations, by zzh2728. Thank you again!

"Sharp and Bright against a Golden Sky"
      original fic here
      translated into Chinese by zzh2728 here

"Ripe as Summer Quinces"
     original fic here
     translated into Chinese by zzh2728 here

"The Rotten Core"
     original fic here
     translated into Chinese by zzh2728 here

"Sharp Lightning against a Dangerous Sky"
     original fic here
     translated into Chinese by zzh2728 here

Calling all language fans, Torchwood fans, and everything in between...

I wrote a little Torchwood fic (actually a series of 5 drabbles) highlighting little character moments for each of the Torchwood team through the use of 5 different languages. Since the fic focuses on languages, I was extra thrilled when someone asked to translate it into Russian. In fact, I liked it so much that I went ahead and did a translation too, into German!

To keep the fun going, I thought I'd open this up to the world... Anybody else want to try their hand at a translation?

It actually makes quite a fun little translation exercise, because it's very short (500 words), but there's also the additional challenge (if you want it) of trying to the same word count as the original, of exactly 100 words per drabble. (You don't have to do it that way, though, unless you want to.) You don't even need to be familiar with Torchwood, necessarily; my German-language beta said she enjoyed the fic and got a good sense of the characters despite not knowing them beforehand.

Here's the original fic:
"Foreign Languages" on DW or on AO3.

Here are the translations so far:
"Другие языки" translated into Russian by bfcure – on AO3.
"Fremdsprachen" translated into German by starfishstar – on AO3 or on DW.

Anybody who wants to join in, go for it! Post or link in the comments here; and/or post and link on AO3. (I really like AO3's linking feature, and would be happy to link to anyone's translation there!)

Someone translating something I wrote into another language is just about the coolest thing ever at any time, but you know what's even more delightful? When the story that gets translated into another language is itself a story about other languages.

A bit ago wrote this little fic that's a set of five (Torchwood) drabbles each centered on a different language, and now that fic has been translated into a different language – Russian. Ahhhh, how cool! Even if you don't speak Russian or watch Torchwood, I think you should check it out simply because translation is always fascinating and delightful!

Original story is here.

Russian translation is here.

Thank you, Olga/bfcure!

Guys! Someone just asked to translate a story of mine for the first time. What a strange and awesome feeling – I've never been the source text for someone's translation before. (At least that I know of, of course.)

The original story is here.
The Chinese translation, by Zlion/苏笙潇 is now here.

(At least, it should be. I had some trouble with the first version of the link, and navigating in a different language isn't easy...)

Cool stuff. I definitely don't speak Chinese at all, at all, but Google Translate (in one of those cases where it is indeed a helpful tool) is enough at least to show me that, yup, it's the same story. I had a lot of fun, actually, plugging different bits of the Chinese version into the translation engine and figuring out what was what.

Turns out here's how you say Harry: 哈利 (Hā lì)
And Ginny: 金妮 (Jīn nī)
Ooh, and Andromeda: 安多米达 (Ān duōmǐ dá)

How cool!

Equally interesting to me is that Google Translate recognizes those sets of characters – which as far as I can tell are simply phonetic approximations of the characters' English names – not just as random sets of syllables, but in fact as "Harry," "Ginny," etc. Which I assume means someone bothered to program the Harry Potter characters' names into the translation engine??

Fascinating.