Alright, a little update here to get the story back in the spotlights.

My dear HH fanficfans!

We were all very excited (at least to judge by your reactions) that we got enough stories this year to - finally - have a real international category. And the new way of running it meant that you didn't even have to read all of its stories - a great advantage if you only read one foreign language and can't make heads or tails of the others.

Partly, this formula has been a success. For the French story Wolf Trap, we've got in quite a few grades.

But what about the rest? ? ? ? ?

We have nearly two weeks left, and I would really like to ask any of you who is able to reasonably read French, or German, or Spanish (one will suffisce) to at least take a serious look at 1 of our international stories.

You really don't have to be bilingual to get the drift of a story, you don't even have to write a review in that language - just check it out, get an idea of what is going on, and let us know how you grade the effort!

So here - for all of you who have had a little schooling/exposure to German, to Spanish or to French - a little introduction to our poor neglected international category!

French: Linorea's Wolf Trap has got quite a few grades already, so (no offense to Linorea!) don't bother with it for now for the grading. (If you liked it a lot, feel free to vote for it though, since it got nominated in the general category as well!)

There is also our short French slash story: J'ai besoin de toi. 1400 words, and by the looks of it, anyone with two years of school French should be able to easily read this. Very short sentences, lots of straight dialogue.

Do we have any slash fans who've had some French at school? Then please give tigra's story a look and tell us what you think of it!

Spanish: These are two new stories, published only last year. Yet no one has sent in any grades for them yet! Come on, people - let's welcome even these foreigners into our little PBA country club!

One is a short story: Un Invierno (by estrella2-15) is only 600 words long. I don't know Spanish myself, but it doesn't look overly complicated, so I guess high school Spanish would enable you to get an idea of what this is about. And I've seen several of you people leaving a review for it - even in Spanish! So where are your grades for it? Let us know, please!

The other story, El Secreto has some extra hurdles: it's some 60,000 words long, and a crossover which you may or may not be acquainted with. This would probably require some reasonably good skills in Spanish, but with Spanish being the second language in the US (as I have been made to understand), surely there must be someone who can read this?

German: four older stories here - three short, one longer.

Dinner for Marya (1100 words, by ensigniago) is written like the script for a play. The dialogue is entirely in English (!), the descriptions for what the characters do (variations on a theme) are written in German. Two years of school German would be more than sufficient to grasp this. You might even get the idea if you don't know any German at all - just by reading the dialogue! So try it!

Lizzi's Ich Bereue Keinen Augenblick isn't very long either (2000 words). It's a series of flashbacks to Stalag 13 from a situation in the future, grouped around a songtext. Lizzi does have a tendency to use contractions and half-dialect ("nee" instead of "nein" for example), so a reasonably good understanding of German is certainly helpful here. But you don't need to be bilingual to grasp the idea of it.

Roxyfoundapen also wrote a German story written around an (English) songtext: Set the Fire to the Third Bar, 2900 words. The German text (somewhat puzzling because she wanted to leave it up to the reader to figure out who the narrator is) is quite advanced, so a reasonably good understanding of German would be necessary to grasp this.

Ein Opfer zuviel (by Patty2) is the most "sophisticated" story-version of the three German ones - ordinary story format, 16,000 words. A reasonably good understanding of the language would certainly be required to follow this.

As you see, most of them are pretty short. So if you have had some schooling in German, or in French, or in Spanish, can you please take a look at one of these stories? And give them a vote ranging from 1 (horrible) to 10 (excellent)?

Really, you don't have to be bilingual to judge a story properly. As long as you get the idea, it's good enough! For even just "getting the idea" is better than "nothing at all", isn't it?

For at the moment, Wolf Trap is the only one who has gotten a decent judgement. The two short German ones each have received 1 grade so far, and the rest absolutely nothing. That hardly makes for a fair judgement, does it?

So let's show our foreign brothers and sisters that we appreciate their work, too. So if you can spare an hour somewhere these two weeks, please try to get around to take a look at one of these stories. There are links to each and every one of them from the PBA site! (see our profile for the link)

And for everyone of course (no matter what language)

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Closing date for sending in your votes:

April 6th, 2012

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(that's Friday next week!)