Chapter 27 | Audiovisual Translation and Fandom

 

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Publication date: 13 September 2018
Copyright date 2019
Hardback ISBN: 9781138859524
E-book ISBN 9781315717166
You can order this volume on the Routledge website

 

 

 

 

 

This chapter delivers an overview of the growing interrelationship between media fandom and AVT practices, focusing on fansubbing, and extending the discussion towards the less established fields of fandubbing and video game translation hacking. Comprising three sections, it first traces the origins of fan AVT, exploring anime fandom in the US and beyond. Secondly, it reflects upon the predominant ways in which fan AVT discourse tends to be framed today, interrogating notions of ‘participatory culture’ and ‘prosumer’ intervention before examining how fan AVT is proximately placed in relation to the fast-developing phenomenon of crowdsourced translation. Thirdly, the chapter considers emergent trajectories, presenting a case study of atypical fansubbing through global TV site Viki, suggesting that this example requires many assumptions about fan AVT to be rethought. Finally, it draws attention to playful, nostalgic practices amongst the fandub and gaming communities. The chapter proposes that fan translators constitute ‘lead users’ (von Hippel 1986) of new technologies, new collaborative AVT methods and unpredictable modes of affective, performative play. In this way, they are positioned at the centre of current developments in the AVT field.

 

 

Tessa Dwyer is Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University, Melbourne and president of Senses of Cinema journal. She has published widely on the language politics of screen media, including her monograph Speaking in Subtitles: Revaluing Screen Translation (2017). Tessa is also co-editor of Seeing into Screens: Eye Tracking the Moving Image (2018).

 

 

The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation Studies provides an authoritative and straightforward overview of the field through thirty-two specially commissioned chapters written by leading scholars in the field.

This state-of-the-art reference work is divided in four sections. The first part focuses on established and emerging audiovisual translation modalities, explores the changing contexts in which they have been and continue to be used, and examine how cultural and technological changes are directing their future trajectories. The second part explores the interface between audiovisual translation and a range of theoretical models that have proved particularly productive in steering research in audiovisual translation studies. Some of these models are associated with disciplines that have long intersected with audiovisual translation, while others are drawn from areas of knowledge that are only now beginning to make their presence felt in the audiovisual translation literature. The third part surveys a range of methodological approaches supporting traditional and innovative ways of interrogating audiovisual translation data. The final part addresses a range of themes pertaining to the place of audiovisual translation in society: these include the institutionalization, academization and technologization of audiovisual translation, as well as its role as a force for social change, both within and outside the industry. This Handbook gives audiovisual translation studies the voice it needs to make its presence felt within the Humanities research landscape.

 

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