#another day another question answered with classic Josie succinctness

[langernameohnebedeutung]

I've seen several fanfic authors (who have clearly stated that English is not their first language even though they are writing at a native speaker level) say that's it's easier to write in English and it would be weird for them to write fanfic in their first language. Do you experience this?

Ohh, that's an interesting question!

Personally I do feel it...to a degree? Which might seem strange because I used to write my fics in German and I do write original stuff in German. And in a way, I think it's sad because I know there is a lot of brillant L1-fics out there, that get hardly any recognition because of this bias against non-English content even among people who could read it.

I think it both has to do with reading habits but also simply with the way fandoms work - especially in the days of streaming and of parallel publications/opening dates.

The thing is, everything is to a degree a 'skill' and you have to learn it. The simplest explanation are probably people who simply first entered English-speaking fandom spaces (even if their first language is a different one) and then started writing. If they're fluent, they're usually going to write in English because the source material is very likely to be in English, it's probably also the language they've already read fic in, and most of their audience is going to be international. So they're used to that. And like most things, writing, writing fanfiction, writing for a certain fandom - it's all practice. You build up a certain skill set. When I started writing in English, I had to acquire an entirely new skill set. I had to learn that certain things that sounded good in German don't sound nearly good in English. I had to learn how to use entirely different registers. I had to learn connotations that things have to an English-speaking audience that they might not have to a German speaking audience - or vice-versa. So if you wrote in English before you wrote in your L1 - or specifically wrote fanfiction in English - it's only normal that writing in your first language might feel weird at first. That's the language you use to run crying to your Mom in to tell her that your brother threw your Nintendo DS into the toilet again - not to describe Dean and Castiel having nasty sex.

Another personal theory of mine would be that fics written in someone's first language kind of live at an unfortunate junction between - A) English being The Internet/Fandom Language(TM) - so there simply are a lot more fics in English and a lot of people who read fic in English - and B) once you're - for example - looking for fic on ao3 or fanfiction.net (which obviously has a lot more content due to being international), you kind of fall out of touch with fanfiction sites in your first language. Because there is so much more there.

Also, with English being the international language, a lot of the works that an international audience can agree on - the big franchises people produce content for - are in English. I'd argue it's slowly becoming a little more international these days, but for a long time it's all been English works: Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, X Files, Star Wars, Superwholock etc. (The biggest exception being Manga and Anime - but even that is mostly perceived through an English lense, because very few people can speak or write in Japanese) - This kind of puts you into the position of deciding whether to A) write in English even if it's not your first language - or B) write in your first language, even if the source material isn't in that language.

Back when I was writing in German, I was still mostly watching shows and films on television (where they were all dubbed). So I was more familiar with the German voice-actors, their speech patterns etc. than the original voices and I was invoking the dub when I was writing. Which meant it felt less like transferring the material from English to German - but it was 'all' German.

For me, the German version 'was' the original, even if I intellectually knew that it wasn't. Actually, sometimes hearing the original voices of the characters sounded weird. (I remember posting a video from House earlier this year and people who watched it when it was on television commented stuff like: "Wait this is Hugh Laurie's real voice?? This sounds so wrong!") Or reading the original English version of a book that I was familiar with in German felt like...touching something familiar through a distorting veil. It wasn't right. (Imagine if someone took your favourite poem and shuffled all the vowels around - you still know what it says, you receive the same level of information. But it feels wrong, you don't get the same level of enjoyment, and every once in a while a horrible misunderstanding happens and your favourite quote sounds like you ordered it from Wish). So back at that time, it wouldn't even have occurred to me to write in English, even if I could.

And then- the first time I did venture into trying to write in English (it was baaaaadddddd), I must have been 15 and I was really into Sweeney Todd at the time.

Now, the fun part here is - Sweeney Todd is a musical. Obviously. And most of the songs aren't dubbed, just the speaking parts were. And it annoyed me to no end to have the characters 'switch voices' whenever a song started. So I'd I usually just watch Sweeney Todd all the way in English. That's why, for the first time, I was actually more familiar with the English voices than I was with the German voices. And while it wasn't a conscious leap from A: "I'm more familiar with these characters English voices" to B: "Writing them in English would therefore feel more authentic" - I don't think it was a coincidence that it was at that time that I started writing in English. And much in the same way, I found it hard to read German fanfiction for Sweeney Todd.

There was also this problem back in the (pre-streaming) day, that dubs usually take time to make. So if you wanted to see the newest content for the franchises you liked, you either had to watch everything online in English - or you had to wait at least a year for the TV release (and, if you wanted to write about it, either record it or have a really good memory) or wait even longer for the DVD release. So sooner or later, I was just sucked into the orbit of watching most things in English on some wonky streams. Because at this point, I was reading English fics already - and once you're reading in English (where you see all these new fics for content you couldn't enjoy yet) - you're extra-motivated to get content as quickly as possible. And in turn, you lose interest in the fics written in your first language, because they're all one year behind you.

So the outcome was that I became familiar with the English voices and speaking patterns and jokes etc of these characters - many of which are very different or are translated differently into a dub (making it harder to write for the dub. So you have to either wait another year to see what they make of it or you wing it). In fact, I stopped watching the dubs altogether because it sounded like some random person speaking over the character. So writing a fanfic in German language became a bit of an obstacle course: Try to be as literal as possible? Try to stick to your own dub (and possibly ignore lines you really enjoyed/'endorse' a bad translation?)

A great example would be du/Sie discourse, which happens in a lot of fandoms:

In the good old Johnlock days, there was a lot of discourse among the German side of the fandom, because in German, we obviously have two ways of saying "you" - the informal "du" and the formal "Sie". And in the German dub, Sherlock and John use "Sie" for a whole long time beyond what people thought was reasonable.

So if someone wanted to write a fic where they're fucking halfway into A Study in Pink they were in an awkward position. The writer would either have to use "Sie" for two guy way past the 'du'-treshold - or they had to go against the 'dub' and use 'du' and potentially alienate some reader who was still on the 'Sie' and thought 'du' would sound to casual for their own fanon characterisation. Many small changes like that kind of...create a rift in a fandom. A rift that you don't have if you write in English.

Basically, there is a lot of stuff that makes writing in your own language like...a translation of a work that does not exist, in a way.

Another problem is this: Realistically, you get a bigger audience when you produce content in English. Simply, there are more readers. Which means more hits, more comments, more interaction - so the motivation is bigger (which means they're going to put more effort into practice time into writing in English - especially if fanfiction is the only writing they do.)

So I feel like at some point, most people who are good in English kind of...migrate to English content and it alienates them from content and fandom culture in their first language.

This also means that there is an age difference btw.

If you learn English at let's say... age 11 or whenever, it takes then a few years more before you're fluent enough to read and write in the language. So if you're writing and posting fanfiction in your L1 already, it still takes at least a few more years until you can start writing it in English. And then you have to build up the confidence to actually post it. So if half of the older fans on your site wander over to ao3 or tumblr or fanfiction.net - that means that younger writers are very strongly represented on the websites in your first language.

Now, before anyone says anything: I know a lot of young people who write very good stuff in no matter what language. And I've seen brilliant fics by people who are in their 30s and 40s and who write in their L1. But...matter of fact is, a very common demographic to write in the L1 tend to be very young writers - some as young as 12 or 13. (And for the record, I love young writers and I'm happy that they're making content) - but as you can imagine, their style and interests often don't align with what older fans enjoy. So the fan who is fluent enough in English and started to set out into international fandom waters and writes in it - might actually feel further alienated by the kind of content they get in their 'home-circles' v what they find on much bigger international platforms. Because finding fics that match your interest is easier on a platform with a million fanworks than it is on a platform with a few thousands.

Now, I can't speak for everyone, but I do generally think that there is a sentiment that I'm...also vaguely guilty of. Think of the way many people look at Wattpad in the English-circles of fandom. Think of the "pack your bags, we sold you to One Direction" kind of meme - if that's the kind of content you associate with the platform you come from - then you're less likely to engage with that website at all, once you have ao3 or fanfiction.net as your second option where you will find a bunch of fics perfectly tailored to your interest. In fact (and I will get back to this later), even if you look for content in your L1, you might find something on those platforms - so you're probably not going to wade back to whatever site you came from to look at 3 fics posted in the last ten months, none of which interest you or live up to your expectations. (And yes, you will also find your fair share of things on international websites that you...don't connect with at all. But objectively, the sheer abundance of content that does interest you balances that out much better. So the gulf between English-language fandom and L1-fandom...deepens.)

I kind of want to show you something interesting. By which I mean I find it interesting.

First of, I actually went on fanfiktion.de, bc it is the biggest non-English fanfiction website I'm really familiar with. And I looked specifically at the TV-show section.

What I noticed is that the most popular franchises fall into at least one of the following categories:

German shows (Alles was zählt, Unter Uns, Tatort (I'll get back to this one), Notruf Hafenkante (?), Alarm für Cobra 11, GZSZ, K11, etc.)

Shows from the pre-streaming or early-streaming days (Star Trek, Buffy, House, Supernatural, Stargate, Castle, Hawaii Five O, the Mentalist)

Shows for younger audiences (Victorious, Glee, Teen Wolf)

Now, obviously the reason that older stuff has more fics than newer stuff is at least partly owed to the fact that it is older, that people therefore have been writing for it for a longer time and that fanfiktion.de is from the early 2000s and ao3, if we were to compare the relative popularities of franchises that exist on both platforms, is newer.

But on the other hand, we have to consider that fandom culture experienced a rapid boom in the last ten years. It stopped being niche. People now casually joke about fanfiction when ten years ago, you barely met people outside fandom circles who even knew what fanfiction is, much less read it or wrote it. And especially Germany (which is a bit...conservative in regards to anything enthusiastic, let's put it like that)...there has been a lot of development over the last ten years, which I guess has a lot to do with the international 'synchronisation' of fandom - for example through streaming and the increasing popularity of parallel release dates around the globe. Also fanfiction is kind of a social medium and we live in the social media age. So you would expect this growth in popularity to give writing in your native language a bit of a boost, because...let's be honest, writing in your L1 is easier and not everyone is fluent in English or confident enough for this - or even to enter English-speaking fandom spaces in general.

Instead, looking at some stuff that is popular among these days, instantly available in the original language and you get...this:

Six fics for Bridgerton. Which...barely seems to align with the tons of content I passively see every time something bridgyton-y is going on on Netflix.

This is Bridgerton on ao3:

Over 4000. So...if you have the choice...you're probably going to write in English to get any interaction whatsoever.

Let's take a look at an older popular franchise with an English source material: Sherlock. Sherlock is among those franchises that is fairly popular on fanfiktion.de. And this is what this means:

You find about 4300 fics for Sherlock on fanfiktion.de

Now, this is how many you find on fanfiction.net for Sherlock:

51.900, if you only count English fics. That's more than 10 times as much.

And this is how many (just English!) you find on ao3:

(nice number) - This is almost 30 times as you find on fanfiktion.de and twice as much as you find on fanfiction.net. Again, English is the more "profitable" language to write in.

But also: Not only do you have an easier time finding something relevant to your interests on the first and the second platform - you are more likely to find readers on the English-platforms who find your writing relevant to your interests. You're simply going to get more engagement -

Let's say you get 5 reviews for your fic on fanfiktion.de. Assuming the ratio to readers and writers is proportional (which I imagine it would not be, because on the international platforms you will have more 'lurkers' who feel confident enough to read and even review in English but not to write fics) - you'd still get 50 reviews on .net to match your 5 on .de - and 150 on ao3. This, again, provides a motivation to write in English that you don't get in German - which means you're more familiar with writing in English and spend more time doing it - meaning that it becomes more strange and awkward to write fic in your first language and how to juggle all the language questions, dub questions etc.

And let's keep in mind: German is still a really big language that over a 100 million people have as a first language and many more can speak. If your first language has much fewer active speakers - you're probably off to tumblr and ao3 much quicker, because otherwise you'll get even lesser interaction.

Another thing: Obviously, a lot of those English fics - probably even the majority - was probably written by native English-speakers. So if something were inherently awkward about writing in your first language, English-speakers would feel that awkwardness, too. Experiencing it as strange is - to a degree - a learnt behaviour.

And the fact that fandoms from the pre-streaming and pre-parallel-release days are more popular on fanfiktion.de kind of implies to me that the same used to be true in those days at least for German fans. That it wasn't considered awkward to write in the first language but that there has been a decline in these last ten years - because when it was accepted to read or watch the translation of your 'source work', a lot of the language transfer problems didn't arise and there was a stronger consensus about what each character actually said and how they said it and how they talk to another character. Things have become a lot more confusing in the last years, language-wise.

Now, something else: I said I was going to come back to Tatort. For context: For many people "Tatort" is the 'quintessential' German show - it's a crime procedural, it's been around since 1970 and it's considered so relevant that newspapers review the latest episode.

So it shouldn't be surprising that people have written fic about it on a German platform:

Almost 700 of them. However, something that is interesting: The first Tatort-fic there was posted several years after fanfiktion.de first went online - and even after that, only very few people wrote Tatort fanfiction, with only an odd handful of fics per year coming in for quite a while.

I've recently noticed that there are quite a lot of active German Tatort-fans on tumblr (a mainly-English-speaking platform) and that people write fic about it. So I went and checked ao3, just for a quick comparison and-

Now, for clarification, the first one are fics in total, and the second is German fics only.

We also have a similar development here as we do on fanfiktion.de: Only a few fics at first - starting about 2011 - but then an explosion over the last two or so years. In fact, on fanfiktion.de, people post about 1 fic per day lately in the Tatort category. On ao3, it's 9 today alone. (No kidding, I'm active in English-language fandoms far less popular).

The reason I find this interesting is - as I said, there has been an increase of popularity of this show among fandom people in the last few years - so if we assume that there has been a similar migration from fanfiktion.de to ao3 as there has been from fanfiction.net to ao3* - then this peak of popularity among fic-writers was long after that rift became as wide as it is today.

*which stands to reason, because clearly most people aren't cross-posting their fics anymore, even if they're not written in English (and quite frankly, the barren wasteland that is fanfiction.fr makes me assume that all this isn't a German-only phenomenon)

Now, I've actually stalked some of the people who do post fics in the Tatort-category on ao3, and most of them seem quite capable of writing fic in English - many of them have several posted. So, assuming that German is their first or one of their first languages + that writing fic in German is awkward for a lot of people who usually write in English: They could very much translate their Tatort fic in English if they felt like it. They probably wouldn't lose any of the audience, bc most people on ao3 speak English. Instead, they chose to stick with the language of the source material - but decided not to post it on a German platform like fanfiktion.net. Likely because ao3 (English) is their most important fanfiction account.

Just to illustrate my point even more, let's once more go back to an older fandom and have a quick look at German Sherlock-fanfics on ao3:

500 on ao3 vs. the 4000 on fanfiktion.de.

Sherlock is a fandom that was popular in dimensions beyond Tatort - all around the globe. But it's relative peak of popularity among people who write fic definitely wasn't in the last two years. In fact, instead of 9 German-language fics per day like Tatort got them, German-language Sherlock fics are posted about...once a week, these days.

But it is a franchise with a peak from before The Big Divide (hence there being a lot more fics on fanfiktion.de for it than there are for Tatort on either site) and the source material is originally in English - so writing fic for Sherlock comes with all the translation baggage to go with it. It makes sense that if people have the choice, they'd not waste their mental energy on writing in German if they can avoid all of that and simply write in English and get a lot more comments and kudos for their work. Especially if it means not choosing between using...for example, forced translations for all kinds of British stuff OR keep the British words in disrupt the narrative flow and make you sound like a teaboo.

So yeah, for me those are the main reasons:

Personal practice (everything is a skill set. Writing in English is a skill set. Writing for a specific fandom is a skill set. Writing in your own language is a skill set. So if you're not used to one of them, you have to learn and learning can feel weird.)

Translation Baggage (Writing fanfiction in Language A when source material is in Language B means a lot of extra mental work. Work that was less pressing when most fans just consumed media in their own language and stayed on language-based platforms, but with DVD (OV usually included) and streaming and parallel releases + a lot more focus on learning English in school, it's become almost obligatory to know and watch the original and base your fics on that.)

The Big Rift (Kind of tying into the former point - the migration from L1-spaces into international spaces usually works really one-way. People get so much more content in English, that they no longer have much cause to journey back into L1-spaces - and in fact, L1- content is much less 'sharable' with your international audience and on your tumblr and with your buddies with a different first language - so if you can produce in English, it's tempting to do so - leading back to point 1)

Community Also tying back into the former point: If you're surrounded by English content - seeing content in your own language starts to feel wrong. Fanfiction inherently "is" in English for many young fans. Tumblr is in English. Reddit is in English (except for some spaces). Your L1 is the language for buying groceries in and talking to your parents and friends in. English is the language for fandom stuff. You have languages with two different assigned purposes. Writing fic in your L1 or talking to the cashier at the supermarket in English both feel like crossing streams. In fact, people jokingly speak in English with their friend sometimes - sometimes with exaggerated accents. And some people here make a German!Supernatural parody AU where Castiel is called Karsten. (Ja, ich sehe euch, Übernatürlich-Gang 👀)

On Netflix, there is a German show called 'Dark' (huge recommendation, I loved, it's brilliant - it's a Noir-style mystery series about a small town and people who disappear into the past and timeloops and stuff, pretty cool - and there is an English dub for the subtitle-averse). Now, I've never written anything for Dark, but I find it hard to turn off my writer brain pretty much ever at any given point of time. And I remember, when I was watching Dark I was thinking about how I would write for it or how to invoke an atmosphere and setting like this and what stylistic choices I would make. And it occured to me that I would find it very weird to write in English for it because...yeah, basically because of a lot of the same reasons that make it difficult to write in German for English stuff. And for me, writing a Noir-style mystery town in the forest in English or German would also...result in different 'feelings' because the setting and the flavours of creepiness would be different. (I think there would be some ...banality to writing it in German that I also experience when watching Dark. Watching a horror movie set somewhere in America - that's 'movie-land', that has nothing to do with me. On the other hand, setting it in a space that feels so inherently familiar - down to the way police cars look or schools work - makes it a lot less dignified but also a lot more...personal and realistic.)

At the same time, I'm currently editing a fic I've written for iZombie - and since it's from the perspective of a character who has a very distinct way of speaking - and of using slang - I can only imagine how long I'd stare at a blank page, trying to figure out how to best translate that into German, if I wanted to.

On the other hand, I've also written fics were I could very well imagine writing the same fic or a similar-style fic in German - for example, I wrote one X-Men fic where I play around with punctuation and orthography and capitalisation a lot - and also, I directly use German words to invoke certain associations and I use imagery from Trümmerliteratur (post-war literature) - now, many of these things I could do even more and a lot more deliberately in German, because hey - more punctuation to mess with, more capitalisation to mess with - and, the reader would actually understand more of the imagery I'm using and I wouldn't have to subtly explain it the metaphors or translate some of the words I'm using.

In fact, I remember thinking a few times when writing it: If this was German, I could go so way, way, way more overboard with this shit here right now. On the other hand, this is where the community and the 'size' thing comes back into play: Because the audience for a 12k word fic where Magneto just sits in solitary confinement and thinks about the world isn't the kind of thing a whole many people are interested in. So posting it in German might just be an exercise in frustration.

On the other-other-other-other hand, I also often think it's a bit sad, you know? Both the rift and the language thing.

For example, when I was...12 years or or so, I found this Kim Possible fic which was brilliant. It was a longfic and novel-quality good. The language was brilliant, the style, the pacing, the tropes. The funny parts were hilarious, the sad parts were devastating, everyone was in character and yet, everything was very nuanced and mature than you'd expect for a cartoon fanfiction and you could relate to everyone. I was obsessed with this fic. Back then, I didn't have internet on my computer - and this fic was really long, so I remember saving each and every chapter as an editor document on my Mum's computer, putting it on an USB-Stick and carrying it over to my own computer so that I could re-read and re-re-read it outside of my assigned internet time (I was a criminal!) - even after Kim Possible stopped mattering all that much to me, so much of that fic lived on in my back-brain. It had a big stylistic influence on me at he time.

Now, as I moved on into English fic spaces, I kind of lost sight of this fic, but at some point in my...early 20s, I rewatched Kim Possible and I remembered this fic. I remembered entire lines from that fic and that's how I found it again. And I actually couldn't re-read it. Not because it wasn't still very good. But because by then, I had watched Kim Possible in English more often than in German and it felt weird to read a fic about it in English.

It's sad because there is this brilliant work out there that a) the author would get so much more cred it for if it was in English (I've even considered contacting them and asking if they'd be interested in a translation to be posted on ao3 with them credited) and b) there is this brilliant work so many people are missing out on. Even people who speak German. Entirely because of this rift in bilingual fandom spaces.

And another thing I can think of - I've once read a (very short, a just a few hundred words) fic for Man From U.N.C.L.E. in Yiddish - because I'm currently learning a bit of Yiddish and I realised that it's a language option on ao3, so I got curious what kind of stuff people are writing and how much I'd understand. In this fic, Illya is Jewish and that's the main-topic of this oneshot and ...the fact that it is in Yiddish to me, personally, actually added a lot to the reading experience (probably even more to someone who actually is fluent in the language). And again, it would be nice if it was more common to share stuff like that around even on the international platforms because I feel like it could get a lot more recognition than it did from what I could tell.

I definitely think that while there can be obstacles and even weirdness in writing in one's native language - especially if someone is used to English-language fanfiction - I also definitely think that there are advantages. There is a certain common base of knowledge of symbolism and language that you share with an audience with the same language background - and you can use that for a variety of things. This common ground you sometimes lack when you're writing in a foreign language about a foreign subject. (I remember when British people on here were making really, really long lists about stuff people got wrong about the UK in Doctor Who and Sherlock fics because they got so weirded out by the way people portrayed their own country.)

So yeah, I get why it feels weird to a lot of people + sometimes it feels weird to me to (but if I would write more German fanfiction, I'd probably also lose some of that apprehension about it). But I also think that every language and 'sphere' can relate to stuff in unique ways and that that is some serious under-tapped potential. I love seeing people make e.g. Desi headcanons or Muslim headcanons for characters and open a whole new perspective on these characters that I would never have had on my own because I lack the context for that - but thanks to that, I do gain some of that perspective and I get to think about characters or world-building I like in a whole new way.

Also, I think if people shook off some of that...awkwardness about non-English fandon contents, it would help include people who aren't that fluent in English and perhaps cannot write their 100k slow burn fic in a foreign language. So it would be great to cross 'The Rift' sometimes and getting over that 'weirdness' and engage with content in our first language. For example, I loved when someone translated one of my fics into Russian - it's really flattering and it makes me happy, even if I don't understand it.