We'd love to have you, no matter how much time you can spare or your level of translation expertise. You can either help as a translator or, if you have little time and/or experience with translation, as a beta reader.

In short, you don't absolutely need to be a translation whizz, since we're always looking for beta readers! You can also join us on a project-basis, if you prefer a limited commitment. Let us know!

This site is being translated by volunteers in their free time. We decided to release core information in your respective language as soon as it was ready, even though the full site translation has not been completed yet. We are working on eventually making all content available to you, but please understand that this takes time. If you are interested in giving translators a hand, please see "I'd like to help, but what are the requirements for translators?".

The OTW translators work in two tiers: the Translation Committee and the language teams. The Committee coordinates the translations and liases with the other committees; the Committee members usually head their respective language team. The language teams vary in size (with at least one translator and one beta reader) and consist of volunteers who are either native speakers, or fluent in a language other than English.

Apart from this website, the translators also help to make other OTW projects like the Archive of Our Own accessible to an international audience.

Please contact us with your question and we'll be happy to answer it.

Please remember that the OTW is an entirely volunteer-run organization—that includes the board members, the committee chairs, and all our staff. Our time is limited and our tasks are many. We do strive to answer questions as quickly as possible, but drafting new answers is time-consuming and they often raise issues that have to be discussed at committee or board meetings.

We don't see ourselves as being in competition with anyone. Much as the ACLU, the EFF, and other organizations have all been involved in the battle for online civil liberties, we think there is a lot of room for a wide range of organizations representing fandom and fannish fair use. We're happy to make common cause with other organizations that share our commitment to serving the fannish community in a not-for-profit, community-based spirit, and we look forward to doing so.

We aren't trying to craft a comprehensive definition of fandom, or to tell anyone whether they should consider themselves a fan. If you consider yourself a fan and are interested in creative transformative works based on your fandom, we hope you may find one or more of our projects useful or interesting.

It depends on the announcement. For instance, announcements by our academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, are intended for an audience of academics and acafans. Some of our PR materials are intended for an outside audience who may know nothing about fandom, such as reporters or the general public.

Our Community Relations announcements and volunteer-recruiting posts are meant for an audience of fellow fans, and we do our best to keep those friendly and more casual.

No, it doesn't. Profit matters, and the degree of transformative quality matters: telling stories around a campfire, freely sharing nonprofit fanfiction, summarizing plot in a book review, or making a documentary film about fans, is not the same as a major commercial derivative enterprise like making a major TV miniseries out of a novel.

We believe fanfiction is already legal and legitimate in the U.S. under Fair Use provisions (and many other countries have a similar legal framework that allows for commentary on and critique of copyrighted texts). There is, however, a lot of confusion and unnecessary fear in this area among both pro and fan creators, and we would like to help clarify the murky waters for everybody.

Something can be legitimate without being commercial. You can play sports without being a professional athlete; you can sing without selling an album.

Our mission is first and foremost to support the fan creators who work purely for love and share their works for free within the fannish gift economy, and who respond to the works that they enjoy. In fact, the OTW was specifically formed to offer an alternative to commercializing fanfic.

The OTW began with a discussion on LiveJournal, but we are taking steps to spread the word beyond LJ, and do want to include people whose primary fannish homes are elsewhere. We already have the following outlets in place and hope to add more:

• OTW's website
• InsaneJournal
• JournalFen
• GreatestJournal
• Yahoo Groups
• Twitter
• Del.icio.us

The broad scope of the wiki is fandoms and transformative fanworks of all kinds, not just the media fandom community and its history. We are looking to host contributions from a diverse range of fans, as they share experiences about the history of their own fannish communities, including but not limited to anime, comics, manga/manhwa, and various RPF fan communities.

The journal is meant to provide a space for academic analysis of individual transformative works and the larger culture of fandom from which they come, helping to demonstrate the social, educational, and aesthetic value of fandom and fannish works.

The OTW has its roots in a fan community with a decades-long history as a community made up mostly of women. Today, due to the internet and new technology, that community and its interests are rapidly growing in various ways and intersecting with other fan communities with different histories. We are excited and hopeful about the way our community is expanding and meeting with other varieties of remix culture, and we welcome anyone who wants to do what we're doing. At the same time, it is still important to us to acknowledge that this particular creative community is a place created and shaped so strongly by the tastes of women, because that is historically a pretty rare and amazing thing.

The OTW neither wants to nor can speak for all of fandom: fandom is huge, no matter how you define it. Right now, the OTW wants to provide a useful, searchable, reliable and stable home for all fanfiction regardless of rating or fandom, and in the longer term expand to other fanworks. In order to do that, we're trying to set up a stable, defensible infrastructure - that's the OTW.

From Naomi:

Creative Commons licenses are not a substitute for the existing fair use rights that readers already have.…I feel that my readers already have the right to write fanfiction and share it noncommercially, and that I don't need to do anything special to make this happen.

From Naomi:

I believe that fanfiction is fair use and does not require my permission. I do highly encourage Temeraire fanfiction and am thrilled if anyone wants to write it.

Fans write fanfiction not simply to write fiction, but to write in a community and to share their ideas about the source with other fans. It is part of a larger conversation. Much fanfiction makes no sense without the context of the original source and the fan community, and is not even intended for an outside audience. Its purpose is as much social and critical as literary.

Currently, most fannish infrastructure projects - like archives, mailing lists, forums, communities, newsletters, and others - are run by private individuals using for-profit hosting services. These for-profit companies do want to make money, and to them, fan creators are a source of free content. They do not have an incentive to support the fannish community unless they can make money off that community, either through fees or advertising.