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pennypaperbrain said:
Someone just left a ‘my English isn’t very good but I love your fics’ comment on one of my stories.I pine after comments like the next ficcer, and I think in the last year the flow has dwindled to almost nothing for many people who used to write a lot around Sherlock S2 time, but it’s useful to remember that an unknown proportion of people are toiling through the text with an English dictionary at hand. I don’t know if there are any stats out there about this ( destinationtoast ?) but in some fandoms it’s probably quite a high proportion. That they’re bothering to do that is definitely an honour.
Anyone with imperfect English who makes it through Four Corners in particular has my admiration. This from someone who translated War and Peace for a larf, but had to leave frequent gaps of ??s.
Second language readers, commenters, and creators have my admiration as well!
You ask a good question about data. I’ve only looked at stats on the languages that AO3 and FFN fanworks are written in and translated into, which doesn’t shed much light on how many users are reading or writing works in second language. (Tagging centrumlumina , in case she knows of any such work or is interested in adding language to any future demographics surveys).
While location and native language aren’t equivalent, we can still use location of AO3 users as one rough proxy for language. (Though that data alone doesn’t allow us to do a fandom-by-fandom breakdown, which might be really interesting.) Here are the results of a 2012 OTW user survey:
It looks from the first graph like maybe ~20% of survey respondents were non-native English speakers as of 2012 -- though the people who heard about and chose to answer the survey are probably not a representative sample of who uses the site overall.
Here are some current stats about the site visitors to AO3:
Looks like it’s still mostly English-speaking countries who dominate the site AO3 usage -- but subtracting out these numbers still yields over 20% of site users who probably have native languages other than English.