disclaimer: I'm chair of the OTW Translation committee and of the to-be-formed International Outreach committee. (does that make me a BNF? :DD? :DDD?)
therefore they have an American bias...
Americans have an American bias. ... so? I have a heavy German bias. *shrugs* You don't need to assume a nefarious agenda behind it -- everyone is biased. The interesting question is whether, and how, one recognizes and addresses this bias.
The only nefarious (okay, okay, uninformed) assumptions here are
a) all OTW people are US-American b) OTW is a homogeneous group who all think alike c) they do nothing to examine their biases.
All assumptions are (surprise) false.
a) yep, most OTW members are US-Americans. It's also almost as international as fandom itself -- we have volunteers from, oh, more than 15 different language groups (the left-hand language list (http://transformativeworks.org/) are only a couple of those engaged with translation atm, there are more in other OTW teams like coders). b) *shrugs* now that's just common sense, right? In a group that big, there will be disagreements and discussions, even if what the world sees is the compromise that was decided on. c) Franzeska talked about the manga & comic-related assumptions here (http://franzeska.dreamwidth.org/119636.html?format=light). And this year, there will be an International Outreach committee (http://lian.dreamwidth.org/125222.html) to explicitly address the USian bias.
I know, this seems a bit redundant, but I wanted to drop a couple of facts here for any interested passers-by (seeing as I came of from fandom_wank myself.)
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2010-01-03 01:50 pm (UTC)therefore they have an American bias...
Americans have an American bias. ... so? I have a heavy German bias. *shrugs* You don't need to assume a nefarious agenda behind it -- everyone is biased. The interesting question is whether, and how, one recognizes and addresses this bias.
The only nefarious (okay, okay, uninformed) assumptions here are
a) all OTW people are US-American
b) OTW is a homogeneous group who all think alike
c) they do nothing to examine their biases.
All assumptions are (surprise) false.
a) yep, most OTW members are US-Americans. It's also almost as international as fandom itself -- we have volunteers from, oh, more than 15 different language groups (the left-hand language list (http://transformativeworks.org/) are only a couple of those engaged with translation atm, there are more in other OTW teams like coders).
b) *shrugs* now that's just common sense, right? In a group that big, there will be disagreements and discussions, even if what the world sees is the compromise that was decided on.
c) Franzeska talked about the manga & comic-related assumptions here (http://franzeska.dreamwidth.org/119636.html?format=light). And this year, there will be an International Outreach committee (http://lian.dreamwidth.org/125222.html) to explicitly address the USian bias.
I know, this seems a bit redundant, but I wanted to drop a couple of facts here for any interested passers-by (seeing as I came of from fandom_wank myself.)