General nonsense

[birdsofshore]

Happy Friday! I have things to discuss.

~~ snowgall, this made me think of you. A study (with bar charts! pie charts! all sorts of charts!) of "aggressive actions" in the HP series, book by book and character by character. Aggressive actions statistics. Can anyone draw any conclusions from this? I wasn't really sure what to make of it, except to marvel at the work that must have gone into it.

~~ I'm going to see James McAvoy in this tomorrow, and to have lunch with who_la_hoop. As you can imagine, I'm pretty excited. I mean, how could I not be. Lunch with who_la! \o/

I'm also fairly pleased about Mr McAvoy. ;) OK, this is embarrassing; I didn't know he was Scottish until yesterday. Why does nobody ever tell me these things?

~~ The very clever catch_life translated some of my fics into Russian for a translation battle. I can't read a word of them, but they look awfully pretty. Here are some links: At Tales told by Severus Snape and on fanfics.me, links 1, 2, 3 and 4. I don't know which is which, but the stories translated were What Potter Wants, This Monstrous Need, This Unstoppable Thirst and One Prick Away from Heaven. Mr Birds put the translation of the last one through Google translate and the title came out as One False Move and You're in Paradise, which both amused and pleased me. I'd imagine things like double meanings must be the worst to translate.

I find the idea of the translation battle really interesting. I don't know any details of how it works but I love the idea of it anyway! Can anyone tell us more details about how such a thing is run?

~~And finally, Steven Moffat has some interesting things to say about fanfiction:

What’s the best or funniest piece of Sherlock fan fiction or fan art you’ve seen?

I don’t know the funniest. There’s been some eye-watering stuff of Benedict and Martin together. A load of it has been superb. There’s a tendency to disparage it. I don’t agree. Even the slash fiction, that’s a great way to learn to work. No one really does three-act structure, but just trying to put words that make somebody else turned on, that’s going to teach you more about writing than any writing college you can go to. It’s creative and exciting. I refuse to mock it—because I’m a man who writes Sherlock Holmes fan fiction for a living!

More from Moffat, including lots of teasers about series 4, here.

Comments

[catch-life.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you so much for praising the translators! I agree with you completely. To be honest with you, I am not a "real" translator - I am a researcher and do something like translations from time to time just for the sheer fun and pleasure of the task. While entering and studying fandoms (the Russian Harry Potter fandom, in particular) I noticed how much effort fandom translators put into it, and how much they really do for the development of ideas across cultures. Russian Harry Potter fandom is pretty alive, I am glad to say that ;) And there are many translators there, working with English texts and with other languages as well, although not so actively, unfortunately, because not so many people know other languages apart from English.
Dostojevski is definitely a very difficult author to translate, but I would say that translating contemporary banter with all its undercurrents or translating smut into Russian (which just doesn't have enough words for it!) is a task of a comparable level of difficulty sometimes :) But it is fun, fun, fun!

[your-insomnia.livejournal.com]

but I would say that translating contemporary banter with all its undercurrents or translating smut into Russian (which just doesn't have enough words for it!) is a task of a comparable level of difficulty sometimes :)

Pardon my interjection but god, yes, this so much. That is one reason I cannot read Drarry in Russian anymore though I used to at some point...In fact, the Russian Drarry fandom was my gateway into English Drarry fandom. It all started with a fic called Драко Малфой и Тайная Комната (Draco Malfoy and the Chamber of Secrets) and it's a mega epic, instant cult classic story that spawned two incredible sequels which detail Harry & Draco's love affair from Hogwarts era into their late forties. I never read anything more epic and romantic in my life before or since and it's no surprise that it got me obsessed with Drarry. The Russian fandom in general produces some amazing work. I sort of wish I could keep up with it still but there is so much to keep up with in the English fandom alone...And also like I mentioned, the smut just doesn't sound the same in Russian. Literally nothing can make me blush when I read Drarry smut In English but when I read the equivalent in Russian, I just want to hide my face in my hands from how red it turns. Maybe that has to do with something personal and how I was brought up (my Russian family is very conservative and polite) or maybe it's the quality of the Russian language itself, I'm not sure.

[catch-life.livejournal.com]

Well - fandoms are huge nowadays, the Russian fandom is not so big as the English one, but still it is big enough. And a lot of amazing texts are produced, not in Drarry category only, but in many others as well (in gen, for example). So if you read Russian you always can switch between both :)
As for the smut - a lot of important work with the language has been done during the last years, so maybe it is not so uncomfortable anymore. Thanks to amazing fandom writers. So I hope one day you'll check :)