Help translate Nerds of a Feather into Chinese!

Hi, friends!

We’re Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together , a website covering covering fantasy, science fiction, video games, comics, cult movies, and other realms of nerddom since 2012. This year, we’re lucky enough to have received our sixth(!) Hugo Award nomination, in the fanzine category, and we couldn’t be prouder of the work our team put together in 2022.

For those who don’t know, the Hugo awards are an annual event celebrating the best in science fiction and fantasy (SFF), and are administered by Worldcon, a major gathering of SFF fans which is held in a different city each year. In the past, this has overwhelmingly been North American cities, with the occasional trip to Europe and just a couple of years held further afield. But this year, for the first time, Worldcon is going to be in China, with Chengdu chosen as the host city. What’s more, for the first time, the Hugo ballot isn’t entirely made up of English language works this year: Chinese fans have also made their voices heard and the result is a significant number of Chinese language finalists across multiple categories, including our own.

To us, one of the best parts of the Hugo awards is discovering new things, and we’re honoured to be sharing a ballot with Chinese fan works and fiction. As none of our flock speak more than basic Chinese, we’re hoping that some of these finalists get English translations which allow us to understand and enjoy them.

But we don’t want that process to be a one way street! In order to help as many Chinese fans as possible to be able to understand and (hopefully) enjoy our work too, we’d like to get a professional translator to translate a selection of our 2022 work, which will then be made freely available to all.

What’s going to be translated?

Every year we’re nominated, Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together produces a free-to-all ebook of our highlights that year, which is made accessible via the Hugo Packet and on our site . This year, that ebook comes in at just over 40,000 words (hey, that’s the minimum word length for the best novel category! We’re a novel!) If we reach our fundraising goal, we’ll be able to translate all of those exquisite and profound words; if we don’t get to the full goal, anything we do raise will go to a smaller selection.

We already have a translator lined up to do the work, who has estimated that translating our full ebook would take a month to complete. We'll therefore be making a call on how much translation we can do by the end of July, so we can get the final product out by the beginning of September.

Why a fundraiser?

Nerds of a Feather is a completely unmonetized site: we’re 100% free to read, and we don’t make money through site advertising, Patreon or any other means. Translation is highly skilled, time consuming work and even if we had the option, it’s not something we could ask anyone to do voluntarily.

We’re asking for community support because we think that our work specifically is worth sharing, and because we think that any work that helps fans to share and exchange perspectives on the genre we love is valuable, particularly this year when communication barriers between the host country and anglophone Worldcon fandom have been so significant.

What if you surpass your goal?

What an amazing thought! Any surplus will be paid forward to support other fan finalists working on translation. If we have nobody to pass it on to, additional funds will be donated to charity.

Thank you so much for your consideration, and 加油 to all our fellow finalists!

- Adri, Joe, Roseanna, Arturo, Paul, Vance, G and the Nerds of a Feather flock