OTW Translation Committee

The Translation Committee is one of the committees involved in the Organization for Transformative Works. 
The Translation committee is an all-volunteer team with members from all over the world. It makes content from the OTW and its projects accessible to fans in languages other than English. It also helps other OTW committees and volunteer pools communicate with fans and users in various languages. Additionally, the committee collaborates with the AO3 Policy & Abuse and Support teams to translate user messages and requests, and help answer non-English comments on public posts.
Internally, the committee is divided into translators and volunteer managers. Translators work in language teams; they create and proofread translated texts. Volunteer managers coordinate the language teams and take care of administrative tasks surrounding translation work, such as making and uploading documents, tracking deadlines, interviewing potential translators, and training new volunteers.
The OTW is made up of close to 900 volunteers from all over the world working in various committees—by necessity, in order to get us all working together, a lot of the OTW's day-to-day work and output is in English. Translation committee’s 220+ volunteers translate some of the vast OTW material from English into some of the many languages that OTW members and OTW project users speak.
==Language teams==
Translators work in language teams of various sizes—from large teams like Italian, Chinese (simplified) and German with 8, 9 and 10 members respectively to newer teams, like Estonian, with only one translator so far. 
As of April 2024, Translation has 47 language teams of varying sizes: Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (both traditional and simplified), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kyrgyz, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Welsh. The committee is always on the lookout for opportunities to start new language teams! For more up-to-date information, check out Translation Committee their webpage.
==History of Chairs==
* 2010: Julia Beck
* 2011: hele braunstein
* 2012: Julia Beck and Agnieszka Siemienska
* 2013: Agnieszka Siemienska and hele braunstein
* 2014: hele braunstein and Priscilla Del Cima
* 2015: hele braunstein, Priscilla Del Cima and Trey C
* 2016: Priscilla Del Cima and Trey C
* 2017: Trey C and SunnyB
* 2018: Trey C, SunnyB, and Ori
* 2019: Ori
* 2020-21: Ori, Natalia Gruber, and Ioana
* 2022-23: Natalia Gruber, Ioana, Heleen and Priscilla Del Cima
* 2023 May: Natalia Gruber, Ioana, Priscilla Del Cima
==Map==
This map shows the concentration of OTW Translation members around the world as of April 2024, with countries with more members shaded darker. (Only members who were willing to appear on the map have been included.) The map shows people's nationality or residence status, depending on what each volunteer chose to use.
===History===
File:Translation members map 14 Jun 2015.png|June 2015
File:Translation members map 28 Jun 2016.png|June 2016
File:Translation members map march2020.png|March 2020
File:Oct2021.png|alt=A map of the OTW's volunteer distribution around the world as of October 2021|October 2021
==Links==
* Translation Committee
* Spotlight on Translation
* Spotlight on Translation Volunteers