Five Things Lona Said
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Five Things Lona Said |
| Interviewer: | Claudia Rebaza |
| Interviewee: | Lona |
| Date(s): | February 24, 2019 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | |
| External Links: | Five Things Lona Said |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Five Things Lona Said a 2019 Q&A guest post, conducted by the Organization for Transformative Works' Communications Committee with Lona.
It is part of a series. See Five Things Said.
Excerpts
What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
It sounds like a horrible cliché, but there is no such thing as a typical week. I can however let you know a bit more about the way our team works! It starts with receiving the English news source texts that need translating or checking for errors, depending on whether you’re the translator or betareader for that specific text.
The source text can be very easy and straightforward, but sometimes you’ll be presented with trickier phrases and terms. If it’s a term or phrase that we suspect will get used more often, we’ll discuss it with the team. The interesting thing here is that the Dutch team is a mix of Dutch and Belgian peeps, so opinions on what translations to use sometimes vary wildly. Especially if it’s between two terms that are both technically correct, but one is more ‘Dutch-Dutch’ and the other is more ‘Belgian-Dutch’. Please don’t ask me about ‘Contacteer’.
As a coordinator we (I and my other teammate, who is also a coordinator) try to make the team run as smoothly as possible. To give one example, this means that we plan meetings to discuss new terms and we add the new terms to our language’s “cheatsheet”, which is like our knowledge base or dictionary.
After new terms have been discussed and decided on, and the texts have been translated and checked, we upload the translated documents to the site for the world to see!
What made you decide to volunteer?
That’s a very uninspiring story, I’m afraid. I was a secretary between jobs in 2015 and bored out of my mind. My husband was out of the country during the week and I desperately needed something to do. Something fun. So of course I turned to fic reading and had recently stumbled on the AO3 where a ‘We’re looking for translators’ post caught my eye. I figured ‘Why the heck not, my English and Dutch skills are both decent and I need something to do anyway’ and applied. That’s when I discovered that I really love translating! So much, in fact, that I made it my career by now.
And of course, after becoming a translator it was only a short and slippery slope to also become a volunteer for the Policy & Abuse Committee. The OTW became my home in a very short time.
What fannish things do you like to do?
I love to read and write. I started out with fanfiction in a paper journal in highschool, writing about DragonBall Z. Then I migrated to Fanfiction.net for my Pirates Of The Caribbean stories before I found my place at the AO3 where I write about DragonAge, Teen Wolf and Mystic Messenger.
I’m also a gamer, so you can probably find me behind my computer with my face plastered to the screen as I’m levelling one of my many World of Warcraft characters. Or discovering that the cake is a lie in Portal. Or going after Darkspawn in DragonAge.