3. Questionnaire analysis

This chapter presents the results of a survey, carried out at the beginning of 2018 in the form of an online questionnaire distributed among fanfiction translators with the aim to get a closer, more factual look at this specific segment of the fanfiction community, allowing us to develop a clearer, more fact-based idea of the exact space this segment occupies in relation to other segments of the vast fan community, whether it’s their “home” fanfiction community as a whole or the “neighboring” communities of other fan translators, providing us with an insight into this specific kind of fan engagement, and at the same time allowing the fanfiction translators to introduce themselves to us using their own words, albeit in a limited context of pre-defined topics and questions. Online questionnaire with a combination of multiple choice and freeform questions was chosen over other possible approaches, such as qualitative interviews or ethically challenging online behaviour analyses, as it was deemed the most appropriate method to obtain facts about and opinions of a community, whose size is impossible to estimate, the scale of whose activity is difficult to assume and who could, in the absence of research aimed specifically at them (at least within the English speaking scholarship), be so far described only or mostly through hypotheses based on comparisons with other similar groups, such as fanfiction writers/readers or other fan translators.

Initially on 17^th of January, the link to the questionnaire was sent to the admins of hpkizi.sk⁷¹ with a request for advice on how to distribute it among their members, and on 2^nd of February to the admins of sosaci.net⁷², with a request to distribute it. The link was shortly afterwards published on sosaci.net, in the SOS’ Facebook group and in the shoutbox (a chat-like feature) at hpkizi.sk. At about the same time, it began circulating by email, was shared in two main Czech Facebook groups dedicated to fan works and subsequently was shared among Facebook users. The link was also sent by email to a small number of selected individual e-mail addresses, which were publicly available, most notably to a few fanfiction.net users and admins and authors at www.jediland.cz⁷³ with the aim to address older fandoms and veteran translators who might not be currently active. On 21st of February, the link with an accompanying text was posted to an online discussion forum at massrelay.cz, a Czech community website dedicated to the highly popular Mass Effect videogame franchise, and was also sent to one of the prominent amateur videogame localization teams, with the aim to address potential videogame fanfiction translators, but no response was received.

The questionnaire was collecting responses from 2^nd of February until 10^th of March, the last response was recorded on 25^th of February. It received a total number of 76 responses.

The questionnaire was written in Czech, with an accompanying text describing the aim and intention of the survey and identity of the researcher and the respondents were informed their responses could be quoted, in full or in part. For the purpose of this thesis, the responses quoted will be translated into English. This decision was considered from an ethical standpoint and it was concluded that, as the questionnaire’s topics do not revolve around any sensitive information, where mistranslation could be potentially harmful, translating the responses into English should be within the acceptable standards of an academic-fan engagement of this kind. It should be noted that while the respondents knew they might be quoted, they could not, for obvious reasons, authorize the English translation of their responses. Care was taken to translate the responses in an accurate way, preserving their main message, but no conclusions should be made based on any perceived implicit or explicit nuances in them.

The answers were preserved in their original form, with several exceptions: abbreviations ff (FF) were replaced with “fanfiction”, abbreviations cz and en were replaced with “Czech” and “English”. Occasionally, when a certain ambiguity or an unclear passage was present in the response, explanatory words were added in square brackets to suggest the issue is present in the original response already. In one case, name of a site was removed.

Note on the question formulations: some of these questions explore topics connected to the concept of quality, but as the word itself could, in the researcher’s opinion, imply existence of a qualitative norm or imply that the researcher is assuming a judgmental position, the questions were formulated in a neutral way without any reference to “quality,” i.e. instead of “quality of translation,” an expression similar to “how is the story translated” would be used.

The structure of the analysis as presented below will closely follow the structure of the questionnaire.

1. Age

This was a simple question to determine the respondent’s age at the time of filling in the questionnaire. No conclusions should be drawn from this overall raw data, as the survey was also accepting responses from translators who considered themselves not active within the community anymore. The numbers collected here were mostly used in context with other demographic data to calculate other statistics (see further below).

1. What's your age?
Number of responses: 74
Number of respondents who chose not to declare their age: 2
Mean age:	30,4
Median age:	27
Modal age:	27
Youngest:	15
Oldest:	56

Table 1.

However, when taking only the declared active respondents into account, the figures do not change drastically: mean age is 30,5, median age 27,5 and the modal age 27. This is perhaps surprisingly a bit higher that what is usually stated or concluded from other surveys among fanfiction writers or readers. It could be, in small part, caused by methodology, as for the purpose of this survey, to be considered “active”, the translator must have translated a story within the last two years. The reason for this will be explained in the corresponding subchapter, but for now this must be taken into account. If the criteria for who is an “active translator” had been different, for example “you are an active translator if you have translated a story within the last six months”, the overall numbers could change, although probably not too significantly.

Cupalová conducted research among slash fanfiction fans in her diploma thesis in 2014 with the numbers being: mean age 27,5, median age 26 and modal age 24. She comments on these numbers being slightly higher what might be expected based on previous research (Jenkins, 2006; Evans, 2006) and suggests that perhaps “the population of fans have become stable,“ (p. 52), with the youngest fans not joining the fandom in such big waves.

Another possibility is that translating, as a different kind of activity to writing and reading and one that requires a different kind of effort on the part of the fan, including a certain foreign language knowledge that is acquired through education and/or experience, attracts slightly older fans.

2. Gender

These results (the number of female vs. male respondents being 74 (97,4%) versus 2 (2,6%)) are not too surprising, given the general mainstream and academic consensus regarding the gender distribution among fanfiction writers (Evans, 2006; Cupalová, 2014), but they certainly do seem to be on the very far end of the realistic spectrum. In Cupalová’s own research, the numbers were 91% females versus 7% males (with 2% identifying as “other”). An article on the ffnresearch.blogspot.cz website (Fanfiction Demographics in 2010: Age, Sex, Country) presents the results of the site’s own complex research into fan demographics on the fanfiction.net site. With regard to gender distribution, the authors state that based on their chosen methodology, they found the ratio to be 78% females versus 22% males, adding that “female/male ratio was stable in our sample and stayed remarkably close to rumours that 80% of the site’s users are female.” It’s worth noting the authors also remarked on the unfortunate lack of scholarly empirical research on this subject.

It’s not possible to say with confidence what has caused this extremely high female/male ratio in this survey. The simplest explanation is the survey failed to reach fandoms with more males (if there are any such fandoms) or simply failed to reach more males, for any number of reasons that are difficult to speculate about. There is no plausible basis for postulating any other hypothesis, for example in relation to popularity of fanfiction translation versus fanfiction writing/reading among females as opposed to males.

If anything, this result could allow us to place the community of fanfiction translators with more confidence within the umbrella realm of fanfiction writers, as opposed to for example amateur subtitlers, where the gender ratio is shown in many studies to be reversed (for example Čemerin & Toth, 2014; Luczaj & Holy-Luczaj, 2014). It might be interesting to compare the results with similar demographic research into the community of videogame fan translators, although this segment is also more likely to be male dominated.

2. What's your gender?
Number of responses: 76
Number of respondents who chose not to declare their gender: 0
	responses	percentage
Female	74	97,4%
Male	2	2,6%

Table 2.