A White Hearth's Warming: Now Available in Russian! · 8:48pm Dec 27th, 2021
So, Christmas is now two days in the rearview mirror, but perhaps you find yourself needing just a little more holiday ficcing to get your through until next December (or next November, or next June, or whenever they start putting up Christmas stuff these days). And perhaps you also speak Russian! If so, then have I got a deal for you.
Earlier this month, ya-RInA contacted me to ask about translating one of my holiday fics, A White Hearth's Warming. Of course I was delighted to give my blessing; I think it's a tremendous compliment anytime someone is interested in putting in the kind of time and effort necessary to do a translation justice. Fiction, even when straightforwardly written, is notoriously difficult to translate effectively, since so much of a story is in the prose and not just the ability to understand the series of events described. There's a lot of work that goes into making even a short story read not just comprehensibly, but in a way that feels the same as in its original language. And on Christmas Day, that translation went up!
Now, I don't actually speak Russian, but it doesn't take an expert to see that ya-RInA did a great job. There's an easy flow to the dialogue that no quick-and-dirty computer translation could simulate, for example, and the comments from other Russian speakers attest that the story--not just "what happened," but the story--made it into Cyrillic script fully intact. I am duly impressed!
If you speak Russian, or are learning Russian and want a more enjoyable (or at least, more pony) bit to practice on than your textbook offers, or if you just want to see what a good Russian translation looks like, you can check it out over here!
I really should read White Hearth's Warming one of these days; it's been on my list for like five years now.
Also congrats.