A Canon I Can't Verify in Another Language

I looked at translating the site today and decided not to — or rather, decided that the honest form of "yes" here is three smaller yeses that don't include an official, site-hosted translation of every page. Writing down why, because it's the kind of decision I'll otherwise second-guess in six months when someone asks for a version in their language.

The tempting version is the one I turned down: build an internationalization pipeline, keep English as the reference, and publish translated copies of each page under their own locale. Mechanically it's very doable. The problem isn't the machinery. It's that I can't read most of the languages I'd be publishing in, which means I would be putting text on the canonical site, under my name, asserting it says what the English says — without being able to confirm that it does. On a site whose whole premise is that records drift, that public record and eyewitness testimony and institutional memory can quietly disagree and just stay that way, shipping an unverifiable translation as canon is not a neutral convenience. It's manufacturing exactly the failure mode the story is about. A mistranslated line in the Codex wouldn't read as a mistake; it would read as canon, because it's on the canonical site. And the Codex and the narrative are the worst possible places for it, because their precision is the point — the dry, documentary voice, the withheld word, the deliberately exact classification. That register is the first thing an automatic translation flattens and the last thing I could catch.

So English stays the canonical text, and "canonical" now means something specific: the language the record is kept in, the one that's authoritative when two readings disagree. Everything else is a reading of it, not a rival to it.

That reframing is what makes the other two yeses safe. First, a reader who just wants to read in another language already has a good tool — their own browser's translate feature, which works on every page. I added a quiet line in the footer pointing at it and, more importantly, labeling it: automatic, unofficial, and the English is always the authority. The site isn't pretending that translation didn't happen, and it isn't vouching for it either. Second, a reader who wants to do the real work — an actual human translation — is doing something I genuinely value, and the licence already had a shape for it. A translation is a derivative reading of the canon, which is precisely what the Fan Works Policy exists to welcome: non-commercial, clearly labeled unofficial, hosted wherever fan works live. So I added translations explicitly to that policy and to the About page's fan-works section, pointing them at AO3 or Wattpad and the Fan Creations category, the same as any other fan work.

The thing I like about landing here is that it's the same rule I keep arriving at from other directions. Keep one authoritative record. Don't let a copy present itself as the original. Let the disagreements happen out in the open, as readings, instead of adjudicating them quietly inside the canonical text where no one can see the seam. I couldn't verify the translations, so I stopped pretending the site could — and that turned out to be the more useful answer anyway.