Amateur subtitling as immaterial labour in digital media culture

Abstract

Media sociologists and cultural globalization theorists have tended to overlook the contribution of translators to the circulation of media content in the era of digital culture. After critiquing the reasons for the invisibility of translation in the literature on global cultural transactions, this article moves on to examine the emergence of new amateur subtitling collectivities in today’s informational society, exploring the role that non-professional translators – specifically, networks of activist subtitlers – play within the participatory media industries. Using examples from a case study of Ansarclub, a Spanish group of engaged amateur translators, this article gauges the extent to which their participation, remediation and bricolage practices – the main components of digital culture (Deuze [2006] Participation, remediation, bricolage: considering principal components of a digital culture. The Information Society 22: 63–75) – fit in or divert from the cocreational dynamics underpinning other domains of the media marketplace. It is argued that the interventionist and ‘monitorial’ quality of activist subtitling lies at the heart of an emerging paradigm of civic engagement, with fluid transnational communities of interest acting as the building blocks of participatory translation.

Keywords

Activism cocreation digital culture globalization immaterial labour media industry media sociology subtitling translation

Introduction

For the last decade, the shift from an electronic to a digital media culture has been attracting attention from globalization and media studies scholars as they attempt to theorize the impact of advances in communication technology on the media marketplace. Although globalization theorists have closely scrutinized the instantaneity of global flows and their influence on the configuration of new audiences, media sociologists have turned their attention to the involvement of creative citizen consumers in the production and distribution of media content – including the implications of these participatory practices for the socioeconomic status of media professionals; but for all the emphasis on the increasingly global scope of media flows, the contribution of translation to the reception of broadcasts across different locales remains underexplored. This article examines the role that amateur translators – specifically, networks of non-professional subtitlers – play within the globally networked media industries. Drawing on the examples of activist subtitling practices, it aims to establish whether and how the main forms of expression of amateur translation fit with or differ from those of participatory cocreation in other domains of the digital media culture. It is assumed here that the existence of similarities across different forms of non-professional collaborative practices will strengthen the case to make translation more central to the agenda of digital media studies.

The first two sections of this article uncover the reasons why the dialectic between digital culture and translation – understood both as an expanding form of cocreational mediation performed by amateur agencies and as an academic discipline focusing on the study of interlingual and intercultural communication – has so far received less attention than other areas of collaborative work in the media marketplace. In the ‘Emerging forms of labour in the informational media marketplace’ section, I explore the first dimension of the dialectic between translation and digital culture. Drawing on a critique of current research on voluntary labour and participatory practices in the media industries, I lay the groundwork for the conceptualization of amateur translators as active consumers involved in the coproduction of media content. The section ‘The genealogy of participatory practices in global media transactions’ explores the second dimension of the dialectic. Appadurai’s theory of cultural transactions is adopted here to inform my overview of the historical evolution of global media flows and the circumstances leading to the marginalization of translation along the way. The first part of this article ends with the ‘Participatory translation practices in the era of media convergence’ section that surveys how translation studies scholars themselves have so far theorized emerging participatory practices within the field. The second half of this article (‘Activist subtitling networks in the digital culture: Ansarclub as a case study’) focuses on activist subtitling networks and examines the extent to which these amateur translators’ participation, remediation and bricolage practices – the main components of digital culture (Deuze, 2006) – are representative of the cocreational dynamics that underpin other areas of the informational media marketplace.

Emerging forms of labour in the informational media marketplace

Advances in communications technology over the last two decades have significantly amplified and accelerated the mediation of cultural practices and experiences, fostering the emergence of new forms of participatory citizenship and consumption in the new digital economy (Hartley, 2009; Von Hippel, 2005). Wellman (2002: 11) argues that the engagement of individuals in the construction of cultural identities and experiences through media is significantly facilitated by ‘the combination of intense local and extensive global interaction’ or ‘glocalization’. Unlike their mass media counterparts, digital technologies allow citizens to reach beyond their immediate personal and professional environment and become active members of global collectivities – clustered on the basis of mutual affinity and shared affiliations – to articulate and promote shared cultural values and practices. This emerging paradigm of civic engagement – that will be explored in depth in the final section of this article – empowers citizens to actively take their place in society by reflexively assembling and circulating their own representations of reality through media. More importantly, collaborative practices allow individuals to become fully ratified participants in the dynamics of digital culture. Ultimately, the new participatory environment has ‘a cultural logic of its own, blurring the lines between economics (work) and culture (meaning), between production and consumption, between making and using media and between active or passive spectatorship of mediated culture’ (Deuze, 2009: 148).

The implications of these ‘cocreation’ or ‘codevelopment’ processes are increasingly being explored in terms of individuals’ capacity to ‘participate in the process of making media as co-creators of content and experiences across professions as varied as journalism, advertising, public relations, marketing communication, television and movie production, fashion, and game development’ (Banks and Deuze, 2009: 420). As the ever-growing range of cocreational practices comes under closer scrutiny, scholars have begun to tease out the implications of amateur mediation for the sustainability of creative industries and the social perception of media workers’ ‘symbolic capital’ (Bourdieu, 1977) – namely the recognition of their expertise and professional latitude as assets worthy of remuneration.

According to Banks and Deuze (2009: 422), studies on cocreational practices have become increasingly polarized into ‘classical development versus dependency theories’. Scholars working under the umbrella term of ‘development theories’ (e.g. Benkler, 2006; Jenkins, 2006) conceptualize the involvement of users in the processes of cocreation as a democratizing and empowering force that thematizes ordinary citizens’ voice and claims to recognition – either individually or as a part of collectivities. Participatory citizenship, these scholars argue, foregrounds polyphony and facilitates associative relationships between individuals and their cultural practices. The new trends in media consumption derived from these developments are revolutionizing programming and marketing decisions and, more importantly, turning digital media into new terrains of democratization. For their part, proponents of what Banks and Deuze label as ‘dependency theories’ (e.g. Ross, 2009; Terranova, 2004) highlight the potential exploitation that media users drawn into cocreational work may experience at the hands of media corporations in the era of neoliberal capitalism. Instead of empowering citizens to participate in the mediated construction of cultural identities and experiences, media businesses endeavour to capitalize on the economic value of user-created content – which is variously termed by different researchers as ‘immaterial labour, affective labour, free labour and precarious labour’ (Banks and Deuze, 2009: 424). The defenders of dependence theories of cocreation therefore argue that the growing social recognition of consumers-turned-producers ultimately represents a threat to the stability of traditional labour structures within the media industries, which is already affecting the identity and livelihood of media professionals.

Banks and Deuze (2009) seek to distance themselves from these polarized views by articulating an alternative perspective on media consumerism as a form of labour that does not necessarily entail a categorization of the relationship between consumers and producers as democratizing or exploitative. In their opinion, the hostility of dependence theories towards cocreational practices derives from their reliance on two outdated assumptions. First, the conceptualization of user-generated content as free labour being appropriated by media corporations is informed by aspects of Marxist political economy which are no longer relevant in the current socioeconomic context. Although in industrial economies labour had to be bought by capital to spur further growth of the capitalist structures, in postindustrial-networked economies, voluntary cocreational work is ‘immanent to the networks of informational capitalism’ themselves (Banks and Deuze, 2009: 424). In other words, being the product of individuals’ deliberate and free interaction with media corporate structures, user-generated content cannot be appropriated by capital. Second, proponents of dependence theories assume that consumer cocreators are oblivious to the fact that the economic and/or cultural value of their work may be used by media companies to maximize their profits – even though a growing body of literature would appear to refute this hypothesis. Drawing on the premise that the penetration of consumer practices into professional media contexts is irreversible, Banks and Deuze (2009: 422) contend that successful media companies may ‘increasingly rely on effectively combining and coordinating the various forms of expertise possessed by both professional media workers and creative citizens consumers, not displacing one with the other’.

Amid the proliferation of both perspectival and neutral approaches to the study of cocreative practices, research on media convergence – understood as the coexistence of ‘a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process’ (Jenkins, 2004: 37) – has so far concentrated on the social, economic and cultural impact of mediated participation. The role of digitization and network technology as facilitators of associative relationships among geographically distant individuals appears to represent a secondary line of inquiry into participatory media cocreation. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to the motivations of creative citizen consumers for wishing to undertake immaterial work and contribute to the global circulation of media content. As Jenkins et al. (2006) explain, the complex interplay between the global and local dimensions at the heart of new cocreative media practices often revolves around fluid ‘affinity spaces’ bound together by mundane or ordinary aspects of collective identity which escape traditional conceptions of collective recognition. Therefore, investigating the motivations and incentives of creative citizens in the era of digital culture demands a more sophisticated understanding of the extent to which contemporary media flows resemble or diverge from cultural translations in the printed and electronic cultures.

The genealogy of participatory practices in global media transactions

Appadurai’s (1990, 1996) theory of global cultural flows acknowledges the crucial role that technological evolution has played in accelerating the transfer of ideas, values and social practices through the media. Despite having been articulated prior to the advent of digital technologies, it provides a useful framework for exploring the sociocultural implications of media convergence in the era of participatory culture. Drawing on Appadurai’s conceptualization of cultural transactions, this section aims to chart key changes in global contexts of cultural production and thus achieve a better understanding of the genealogy of participatory practices in the digital culture.

In Appadurai’s theory, global cultural transactions are shaped by the interplay between the five constitutive dimensions of such flows. These pertain to the shifting distribution and mobility of persons (‘ethnoscape’), the spread of capital and commodities across countries (‘finanscape’), the uneven levels of technological capacity available in different regions (‘technoscape’) and the sets of political values and narratives prevailing in different communities across the globe (‘ideoscapes’). ‘Mediascapes’, the fifth and most relevant dimension to the purposes of this article, are defined as ‘the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate’ media content (Appadurai, 1990: 9). Global flows, as argued, constitute highly complex transfer processes due to the growing disjuncture between their five constitutive strands as ‘people, machinery, money, images, and ideas now follow increasingly non-isomorphic paths’ (Appadurai, 1990: 11). For example, as early as in the 1990s, politically oppressed communities all over the planet were able to access and engage with images of democratic life that satellite and cable TV broadcasts from more affluent developed societies were disseminating in their environment. In these contexts, mismatches often arise between the authoritarian rhetoric of local politics and the visibility of transnational democratic values disseminated by global media. This disjuncture between totalitarian ideoscapes and capitalist mediascapes – that may ultimately contribute to bringing down dictatorial regimes – encapsulates the powerful generative potential of technology-driven, multidimensional global flows.

Although Appadurai’s theory predates the era of digitization, it aptly anticipates the effects that the spread of networked technology has had on the mediation of cultural practices and experiences two decades later. One of the most suggestive insights of Appadurai pertains to the need for a reconceptualization of cultural transactions across communities. The fact that the emerging transnational communities of interest – bound together through sophisticated media capabilities – is geographically fragmented called, in his opinion, ‘for theories of rootlessness, alienation and psychological distance between individuals and groups’ (Appadurai, 1990: 3). Appadurai’s contention that deterritorialization underpins the construction of globalized affinity spaces has indeed proved to be very influential. Most significantly, it is at the basis of a growing body of scholarly studies on the interface between digital technologies and globalization. In this light, the ‘time-space compression’ (Harvey, 1989) or ‘de-materialization of space’ (Cronin, 2003) derived from the advent of digitization have become instrumental in accounting for the capacity of media to overcome spatial barriers and speed up the circulation of global media flows.

The second of Appadurai’s contributions to current academic debate on the cultural economy – and, more specifically, the growing processes of media convergence – concerns the changing relationship between production and consumption as the post-industrialist economic models gave way to the predigital globalization era during the 1980s. According to Appadurai, this change undermined the central role that the ‘fetishism of the commodity’ (Marx, 1992: 187), understood as the objectification of economic value into an objective force that mediates social relationships, played in industrial economies. Instead, the transnational economic structures that gained prominence with the onset of globalization marked a shift towards what Appadurai calls the ‘fetishism of the consumer’ (Marx, 1992: 15). Faced with an exponential increase in commodity flows and competition, producers had to find new ways of attracting consumers on a global scale. In the first instance, advertising became

the key technology for the worldwide dissemination of a plethora of creative, and culturally well-chosen, ideas of consumer agency. These images of agency are increasingly distortions of a world of merchandising so subtle that the consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an actor, where in fact he or she is at best a chooser. (Appadurai, 1990: 16)

The conversion of consumers into agents outlined by Appadurai represents the first step in the process towards the conflation of consumption and production and allows for a better understanding of the gradual rise of participatory culture in the era of digital media.

Since Appadurai first articulated his theory in the 1990s, the disjuncture between the five constitutive dimensions of global flows has widened, particularly with regards to the interplay between technoscapes and mediascapes. Although the flows of people, capital and ideas have also become more fluid over the last two decades, changes in technological capacity across the globe have been distinctly dramatic. In particular, the growing ubiquity of media technologies and the ensuing proliferation of cocreative practices, including the self-mediation of cultural experiences, have played an important role in bestowing agency on citizen consumers. In the era of media convergence, members of politically oppressed communities cannot only access global broadcasts. Capitalizing on the affordances of digital technologies, original media content can now be appropriated, annotated and produced by individuals driven by their aspirations to join the global community of developed societies (Jenkins, 2004: 33). Appadurai’s theory of disjuncture in the global cultural economy would therefore seem to provide an adequate explanatory framework for the engagement of creative citizens in participatory practices of self-mediation and the ensuing interaction between professionals and users in the context of global media convergence (Jenkins, 2001).

The morphology of global flows, however, is not determined by the interaction between technoscapes and mediascapes. The most relevant dimension of Appadurai’s theory to the topic of this article concerns his stance on the role of language within the wider context of global cultural transactions. In combination with images, language turns mediascapes into ‘narrative-based accounts of strips of reality’ consisting of ‘a series of elements (such as characters, plots and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places’ (Appadurai, 1990: 9). At the interface between mediascapes and ideoscapes, language becomes the means through which clashing or mutually reinforcing narratives – understood as sets of worldviews and political values – are negotiated among members of a given community of interest or across different political or cultural constituencies. Seen in this light, global flows call for the processes of both ‘semantic’ and ‘pragmatic’ translation. In Appadurai’s view, the notion of semantic translation designates the process whereby words are replaced with carefully chosen lexical equivalents in other languages to facilitate the reception of global flows across different geographical and linguistic contexts. Pragmatic translation, on the other hand, involves the adaptation (or lack thereof) of the narrative-based accounts of reality circulated through the mediascapes to fit with the ideoscape prevailing in each locale. It is therefore argued that the pragmatic translation is ultimately responsible for how media content is collectively read both within national groupings and transnational communities of interest.

Appadurai’s stance on language would appear to be far more sophisticated than much of what has been published recently on this aspect of digital culture. The emphasis of most novel scholarship in this area tends to be placed on the ‘transworld simultaneity’ and ‘instantaneity’ (Scholte, 2005) of media flows, which are regarded as transformational developments facilitating ‘the rapid and extensive juxtaposition of, and comparison between, different cultures and spaces’ (Lash and Urry, 1994: 243). Globalization theorist Castells (2000, 2007), who has examined how supraterritorial and interconnected audiences engage in such processes of juxtaposition and comparison, contends that ‘[w]e are indeed in a new communication realm, and ultimately in a new medium, whose backbone is made of computer networks, whose language is digital’ (Castells, 2007: 248).

If extrapolated to the field of creative media making, Castells’ argument entails producers and users inhabiting the supraterritorial space of global media flows speaking a ‘universal’ digital language that underpins the increasingly interdependent production and consumption of digital media content. Irrespective of whether the term ‘language’ is used literally (perhaps in reference to the use of English as a lingua franca) or metaphorically (as a loose synonym for the notion of digital ‘media literacy’ proposed by Livingstone (2004)), the instantaneity of the sphere of global media flows appears to be predicated on its monolingual nature – in contrast to the linguistically diverse, physical spaces of individuals’ everyday life. According to Bielsa and Bassnett (2009: 18), the prioritization of simultaneity by globalization theorists has ‘obscured the complexities involved in overcoming cultural and linguistic barriers’. If, as media and globalization studies scholars argue, the consumers’ engagement in the creation of media content and experiences is shaped by the interaction between the aspects of their local environment and the constraints derived from their chosen global affiliations, the contribution of translation to the emergence and evolution of digital culture has to be examined in more depth.

Participatory translation practices in the era of media convergence

Translation studies have only begun to explore the implications of linguistic and cultural differences for the emergence and consolidation of digital culture. The centrality of participatory practices and cocreational work in the process of media convergence sits uncomfortably with the discipline’s traditional conceptualization of the economic and commercial dynamics of translation in terms of ‘patronage’ (Lefevere, 1992). Predicated on a radical division between commissioners and professional translators, patronage articulates the capacity of certain ‘powers’ – whether they be individuals, political or religious institutions, social classes, publishers or the media (Lefevere, 1992: 15) – to decide what is to be translated and determine the appropriate level of remuneration for translators. But as translation diversifies and moves towards the core of economic and cultural activities, the involvement of non-professional agents in the process of media convergence is beginning to challenge our understanding of translation agencies and the current organization of labour in the translation industry.

Although a shift towards a more collaborative model of translation – revolving around communities of professional translators who work asynchronously under the supervision of a project manager – can be traced back to the mid 1990s (Beninatto and DePalma, 2008), the involvement of amateur translators in digital media spaces is much more recent. Keeping apace of the effect that connectivity and networked technologies have on the production of media content appears to be one of the main drives behind the fast development of participatory translation. Désilets et al. (2006) and Désilets (2007), for example, account for the ongoing ‘wikification’ of translation in terms of the revolutionary changes in content production and consumption that multilingual collaborative sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube and SecondLife have brought about. These fundamentally collaborative environments, as argued, have a profound impact not only on the way in which content is produced but also on the way in which content is translated. But the growth of participatory translation has not only been studied in terms of its subordination to ‘the collaborative creation and maintenance of multilingual wiki content’ (Désilets et al., 2006: 19). In his study, on the dialectic between translation and media technologies, Perrino (2009) uses the term ‘user-generated translation’ to designate ‘the harnessing of Web 2.0 services and tools to make online content – be it written, audio or video – accessible in a variety of languages’, thus casting media technology in an auxiliary role. Whether it is conceptualized in terms of wikification or user-generation, translation is beginning to contribute decisively to the consolidation of ‘commons-based peer production’ structures (Benkler, 2006), which have proved so far to be particularly productive in ensuring the representation of non-Western news and opinions on the global news media (Salzberg, 2008) as well as the viability of cultural exchanges in an increasingly polyglot Internet (Zuckerman, 2008).

The involvement of reflexive consumers in the translation of audiovisual global flows has, however, received significantly less scholarly attention to date. In particular, two key aspects of this domain of participatory translation remain conspicuously underexplored: the range of motivations fuelling viewers’ participation in the translation of audiovisual programmes and the status of translation vis-à-vis other professions involved in cocreational activities. The remainder of this section aims to redress these gaps in the literature and achieve a better understanding of the nature and scope of audiovisual participatory translation as an emerging form of cocreative labour. To begin with, an attempt will be made to chart out the territory of audiovisual participatory translation, proposing a basic taxonomy based on the contexts of production at the centre of audiovisual global flows. This will be followed by an exploration of these citizens’ agendas in the context of global cultural processes.

Drawing on Foucault’s (1982) study of the connections between human relationships of production/signification and social power structures, Chouliaraki (2010: 227) articulates ‘the dialectical relationship between media technologies and the participatory practices these technologies enable’ in terms of two dimensions. The first dimension, the ‘technologization of democracy’ pertains to the capacity of communications technology to foster a participatory environment for the mediated participation of ordinary people in public culture while restricting the range of discourses and genres available for the materialization of such cocreational practices. A number of recent studies on amateur subtitling of audiovisual media flows can be clustered around this first dimension of the dialectic. Koskinen (2010), for example, explores the technologization of democracy in the context of the European Union’s strategy to stimulate the participation of citizens in its institutional activities through a range of web-based communication spaces, including dedicated channels in social media networks. Against the backdrop of increasing ‘audiovisualization’ of EU communication, the participation of citizens in the subtitling of institutional content is identified as a productive strategy to foster ‘active affective citizenship’, although the genre of audiovisual texts available to amateur subtitlers is restricted to the genre of ‘infotainment’. The ‘potential of collective intelligence’ (Jenkins et al., 2006), in the form of linguistic expertise, is also being harnessed by a number of partnerships between open software providers and a range of companies and non-profit organizations seeking to actively promote the global circulation of their media content. For the purposes of illustration, two of these partnerships will be briefly examined here.

Since April 2007, non-professional organization TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) has been circulating ‘free knowledge from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also [building] a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other’¹ through its website. In 2009, with the sponsorship of a global telecommunications company and the technological support of free online subtitling tool dotSUB,² TED launched its Open Translation Project that ‘brings TEDTalks beyond the English-speaking world by offering subtitles, time-coded transcripts and the ability for any talk to be translated by volunteers worldwide’.³ While TED has empowered hundreds of amateur subtitlers – including speakers of less-dominant languages – to partake in the coproduction of media content, their work is constrained by the organization’s standards of translation accuracy and style guidelines for translators.⁴ Through their work, TED subtitlers contribute to the market penetration of dotSUB’s enterprise solutions⁵ and, by extension, maximize the spread of crowdsourcing as a business model for the translation of corporate online content (Ray and Kelly, 2011).⁶

Al Jazeera also crowdsources the translation of citizen media footage from Syria, Tunisia and other Arab spring hot spots as part of a project blurring the traditional boundaries between media producers and consumers. Amateur subtitlers join teams of individuals with similar linguistic expertise through a dedicated website⁷ and engage in collaborative work using Universal Subtitles⁸ – an online toolset and community facilitating both the subtitling and circulation of subtitled videos – to complement Al Jazeera’s news output from around the globe. Universal Subtitles is one of the tools developed by PCF (Participatory Culture Foundation), a ‘non-profit organization, [. . .] dedicated to supporting a democratic media by creating open and decentralized video tools and services and [. . .] working to eliminate gatekeepers and empower communities around the world’.⁹ The synergies between PCF’s work towards an open and collaborative world and Al Jazeera’s initiative – born out of a desire to give visibility to the mediated participation of ordinary Arab people in global media – are clear and provide a robust platform for this participatory process of media convergence. Unlike other cocreation projects, however, amateur subtitlers involved in this venture are constrained by the technical limitations of the subtitling tool and the range of texts made available for translation – which ultimately allow Al Jazeera to construct and circulate a specific narrative of events in the Arab world on a global scale and, arguably, to promote the brand worldwide.

The technologization of democracy – as illustrated by the crowdsourcing of translations favoured by the European Union, TED and Al Jazeera – informs participatory practices in relatively institutionalized sites. But as the citizens’ involvement in these settings is constrained by the organizational agendas and technological infrastructure, their participation reproduces, to some extent, ‘the institutional power relations that such participation seeks to challenge’ (Chouliaraki, 2010: 227). The second dimension of the dialectic between media technologies and participatory practices, on the other hand, tends to prevail in less institutionalized environments with little or no regulation. Labelled as the ‘democratisation of technology’, this context of cultural production fosters radical forms of citizenship articulating ‘novel discourses of counter-institutional subversion and collective activism’ (Chouliaraki, 2010). Scholarly interest in participatory subtitling of audiovisual media flows within this dimension of the dialectic has so far revolved around two main areas of mediation, aesthetic and political activism and has brought to the fore the role that the networks of engaged amateur translators are playing in terms of cultural resistance against global capitalist structures through interventionist forms of subtitling.¹⁰

Archiving, annotating, appropriating and recirculating media content – four processes leading to the emancipation of viewers as a result of developments in communications technology (Jenkins, 2004) – are central to the workings of networks of politically engaged amateur subtitlers who, drawing on their collective intelligence, set out to resist specific political, cultural or religious narratives that circulate in their environment. Pérez-González (2010), in one of the few studies addressing this form of participatory mediation, contends that politically engaged subtitling resists the dynamics of mainstream media and challenges the control that global corporations have traditionally exerted over the distribution and consumption of their content. Political activists involved in participatory subtitling take on the role of self-appointed translation commissioners and set out to selectively appropriate the audiovisual content they intend to appropriate, subtitle and distribute. The very selection of media content to be collaboratively translated by the networks of activists represents a key aspect of activist subtitling as, in most cases, it would not have otherwise reached the subtitlers’ target constituencies.

As is also the case with other forms of amateur participation in digital media spaces, the rise and consolidation of networks of activist subtitlers seeking ‘to elaborate and practise a moral order in tune with their own narratives of the world’ (Baker, 2006: 481) through their involvement in practices of self-mediation can, to some extent, be explained in terms of Appadurai’s theory of global cultural interactions. On the one hand, the increasing disjuncture between technoscapes and mediascapes – whereby digital technologies are becoming available even to those communities who had traditionally been at the receiving end of global flows – has empowered citizens to effectively take on an agentive role in the appropriation and recirculation of media content and experiences. On the other hand, Appadurai’s concept of pragmatic translation – designating the adaption of narratives as they travel across ideoscapes, so that they can resonate in a range of languages and cultures – goes some way towards operationalizing the dynamics of translational communities of interest for whom these subtitlers cater. But for all the similarities that exist between amateur subtitlers and other types of ‘prosumers’, the contribution and involvement of reflexive consumers in the translation of audiovisual global flows remains vastly underexplored.

Activist subtitling networks in the digital culture: Ansarclub as a case study

Building on ongoing efforts to theorize the shift from an electronic to a digital culture, this article acknowledges the generative potential of participatory cocreational practices in the media marketplace and the challenge that the social recognition of amateurs’ work represents to traditional labour structures. Against this backdrop, this article sets out to explore the role that amateur translators – specifically, networks of non-professional subtitlers – play within the globally networked media industries. Of particular interest is to establish whether, as is the case with other creative citizen consumers, activist subtitlers take part in the process of ‘reconstitution’ (Deuze, 2006: 66) through which individuals make sense of ‘the manifold scrambled, manipulated and converged ways in which we produce and consume information worldwide’ (Deuze, 2006) in the era of digital culture. Following Deuze, it is assumed that digital culture is not to be understood simply as the computerization of the production and circulation of media content; ultimately, digital culture is ‘an emerging value system and set of expectations’, whose praxis represents ‘an expression of individualization, postnationalism and globalization’ (Deuze, 2006: 63–64).

The main question to be addressed in the second part of this article can be formulated as follows: How does amateur subtitling fit with or differ from other forms of participatory self-mediation within the wider process of media convergence? The impetus behind this research question is the assumption that potential similarities across different forms of non-professional collaborative practices would bring to the fore the centrality of translation to scholarship in the field of digital media studies. This question can be broken down into a number of subquestions: What similarities can be observed between the clustering of amateur translators around activist subtitling networks, and the fluid collective affiliation choices made by individuals involved in other types of cocreation? To what extent does the stance of activist subtitlers vis-à-vis mainstream subtitling practices resemble the coexistence of prosumer and professional labour in other domains of the digital media industries? How does the activist subtitlers’ interventionist approach to the translation of media content (Pérez-González, 2006, 2007) compare with other cocreators’ (lack of) commitment to professional standards of objectivity and fidelity? These questions encapsulate the principal components of digital culture according to Deuze (2006): participation, remediation and bricolage. To keep the discussion within manageable bounds, the remainder of this article will focus exclusively on networks of political activist subtitlers (as opposed to their aesthetic activist counterparts), in an attempt to establish the extent to which their participation and engagement in remediation and bricolage activities contribute to the realization of digital culture.

Activist subtitling networks

Although this article is largely theoretical in its arguments and aims to provide a basis for the development of further applied research, illustrative examples from qualitative research conducted since 2009 will be drawn upon to support those arguments. In discussing how activist amateur subtitlers exercise their cocreational agency (participation), challenge mainstream narratives (remediation) and produce alternative accounts of reality around them (bricolage), I will focus on the work of Ansarclub, a network of (mostly Spanish) activist non-professional translators responsible for 27 subtitling projects between 2006 and 2010.¹¹

Ansarclub was formed in July 2006, when readers of a Spanish progressive blog decided to join forces to subtitle (into Spanish) an interview in which Spain’s former Prime Minister, José María Aznar López, gave to HARDtalk (BBC News) against the backdrop of the ongoing military conflict between Lebanon and Israel. For a range of reasons (see Pérez-González (2010), for an in-depth account), this interview provided progressive constituencies in Spain with useful ammunition to continue fuelling the public backlash that led to Aznar’s electoral defeat in March 2004. In the interview, the former Prime Minister reasserted his unreserved commitment to the neoconservative narratives circulating during the Bush years and the practical implications of those policies – including the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that much of the Spanish public regarded as the cause of the Madrid train bombings on 11 March 2004 (Govan, 2009). When it became clear that Spanish TV channels would not be broadcasting the interview in full, this spontaneously formed network of engaged individuals set out to import the interview from the deterritorialized sphere of global flows (BBC’s worldwide audience) into a specific linguistic locale (Spanish-speaking progressive collectivities consuming news online).¹² Over the following 4 years, Ansarclub continued subtitling into Spanish audiovisual content that showcased Aznar’s ultraconservative views. Examples include an Al Jazeera documentary news programme (2007) The Madrid Connection (2007), JWP in association with Al Jazeera¹³ seizing on revelations¹⁴ that plans to invade Iraq had been agreed between Bush, Aznar and Blair even before they took steps to seek a second resolution by the UN’s Security Council, and Israeli footage (2010) of Aznar giving a keynote address (in English) to delegates attending the World Jewish Congress about the recently launched ‘Friends of Israel’ initiative.¹⁵ Overall, the negative ‘framing’ (Baker, 2010) of Aznar’s persona in the 27 subtitling projects undertaken by Ansarclub – whether in relation to his record in office or even his personal ‘flaws’ (smugness, poor English, megalomania) – acts as the factor binding individuals positioned to the left of the Spanish political spectrum together as members of this politically engaged network of amateur subtitlers.

Participation

During its lifetime, Ansarclub developed into a fluid network of 11 engaged amateurs based in Spain, Argentina and Venezuela who specialized in one or more of a range of translating and technical roles – thus capitalizing on the potential of networked communication to exploit their collective intelligence. Three of the Ansarclub members had previously worked together as part of the ‘ad hoc’ network that subtitled Aznar’s HARDtalk interview.¹⁶ Pérez-González (2010) shows that this original community consisted of readers of a progressive Spanish blog who began interacting through their online posts in response to an entry published by the blogger. This exchange of posts among readers – consisting of a majority of Aznar bashers and a minority of supporters – constitutes a dynamic process of contextualization involving relatively complex negotiations of narrative affinity. The group of engaged blog readers that would eventually take on the subtitling of the interview and the great majority of readers and consumers of the subtitled interview subscribe to a broad narrative that gives cohesion to the network (e.g. opposition to American, Israeli and European foreign policies in the Arab world). However, they also differ in terms of their intersecting narratives, that is, the range of personal world views that brings about the arborization of core narratives though processes of identity inflection.

The mobilization of specific aspects of their identity on the basis of their interaction with other group members is also central to the work of Ansarclub. As confirmed by subtitlers’ comments published in response to their viewers’ posts, Ansarclub members are also drawn to this transnational community of interest by their hostility towards Aznar and his subservience to Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ campaign. However, they do not necessarily agree on the ramifications of the shared narrative interface (e.g. the need to marginalize Israel in the international scene or the pernicious effects of promoting transatlantic cooperation at the expense or European integration, to mention but two examples). Drawing on a generative conceptualization of translation activism, Pérez-González argues that these networks of activist amateur subtitlers

are best defined in terms of its gravitational core, rather than discrete external boundaries. As we move away from the core, entropy increases, with community members mobilizing other aspects of their identity and subscribing to intersecting narratives that may differ from those favoured by their fellow network members. Narrative entropy inflects members’ identities and affiliations, thus detracting from the cohesion of any given community. (Pérez-González, 2010: 264)

The fact that participation in amateur subtitling collectivities appears to be driven more by fluid individual identities than by membership of traditional entrenched constituencies (e.g. social class) is, to a large extent, the result of gradual advances in communication technology. Writing before the shift from the electronic to the digital era, Lash and Urry (1994) noted that the sustained prioritization of instantaneity in global flows reinforces ‘individuation in the sense of the atomization of normalized, ‘“niche-marketed” consumers’ (Lash and Urry, 1994: 113, quoted in Venuti, 2008: 21). More recently, Jenkins et al. (2006) have brought to the fore the contribution of communication technology to the articulation of ‘affinity spaces’ – defined as ‘highly generative environments, from which new aesthetic experiments and innovations emerge’ (Jenkins et al., 2006: 9) – as the building blocks of participatory cultures. This empowerment of engaged amateurs by the growing ubiquity of media technologies and the prioritization of instantaneity is thus conducive to the proliferation of critical cocreational practices by resistant communities.

The tension between individuation and civic engagement, which lies at the centre of activist subtitling, would also appear to pervade other domains of cocreational practice in the networked digital culture. During the early stages of the electronic era, participation was conceptualized as the product of sociocultural standardization. The growing instantaneity and serial reproduction of media flows afforded by technological developments, Baudrillard (1983) argued, contributed to the erosion of idiosyncrasies across individuals. Deuze’s (2006) own understanding of participation in the era of digital culture, however, revolves around the notion of ‘hypersociability’, with networked individuals renegotiating and ‘rebuild[ing] structures of sociability from the bottom up’ (Deuze, 2006: 67). Drawing on Schudson (1995), Deuze argues that the hypersociability processes underpinning contemporary cocreational practices involve ‘a shift in the identity of citizens [. . .] from a rather passive informational citizenry to a rights-based, monitorial and voluntarist citizenry’ (Schudson, 1995). This political dimension of hypersociability marks yet another point of similarity between activist subtitling and other forms of cocreational participatory work.

Remediation and bricolage

Ansarclub members are driven by a clearly monitorial agenda. They capitalize on suitable broadcasts produced in English and circulated among deterritorialized audiences to undermine Aznar’s political standing in the eyes of Spanish-speaking progressive constituencies. Audiovisual broadcasts with the potential to discredit the former Prime Minister were thus subtitled and recirculated for the benefit of a self-selected sympathetic audience, on the assumption that the translated text would resonate strongly with their own narrative location.

Interventionist stances such as that of Ansarclub members challenge the control that media corporations have traditionally exerted over the production, distribution and consumption of their broadcasts in a number of ways. Seen in this light, cocreational work can be constructed as an act of resistance against the dynamics of the global media marketplace. Translation, one of such cocreational activities,

might intervene into the postmodern situation by tampering with the simulacra that drive the global economy. A translator might use the images on which capital relies to short-circuit or jam its circulation by translating so as to question those images and the practices of consumption that they solicit. (Venuti, 2008: 21)

The decision of amateur subtitlers to engage with media content and tamper with it, in an attempt to resist and subvert the economic and political discourses and structures that underpin the wider context of production, is one example of what Deuze (2006) labels as ‘remediation’. In the case of activist subtitling, refashioning practices allow prosumers to modify or manipulate media content to reform conventional representations of reality in a range of ways. Unlike mainstream professional subtitlers, for example, amateurs make their presence felt within the subtitles, now turned into the sites of narrative negotiation that allow for an ongoing coconstruction of an affinity space with online audiences. Figure 1, for instance, illustrates the subtitlers’ use of brackets to delineate spaces for both self-expression and collective affiliation. Throughout this remediated version of Aznar’s address to the World Jewish Congress (Jerusalem, 1 September 2010), Ansarclub subtitlers draw the viewer’s attention to the former Prime Minister’s poor command of English. In the featured subtitle, the network members pick up on the fact that part of the audience is looking away from Aznar to note that ‘Los pobres en primera fila ya no aguantan mas’¹⁷ (‘The poor sods in the front row can’t cope any longer’). By bringing into sharp relief the occasional unintelligibility of Aznar’s speech, it is assumed by these subtitlers that the pointlessness of both his speech and the wider event will become evident for the audience.

Figure 1.

Aznar addressing the World Jewish Congress (Anzarclub’s subtitled version, 2 min 15s).

A similar lack of concern over their perceived objectivity is exhibited by Ansarclub’s members in Figure 2. In this example, the subtitling of Aznar’s unfolding argument (i.e. the West needs to defend Israel to defend itself) is interjected with sarcastic remarks alluding to the potentially hostile reception that such views would receive within Spain: ‘Por que no dices eso en casa, Ansar?’ (‘Why don’t you say that at home, Ansar?’¹⁸).

Figure 2.

Aznar addressing the World Jewish Congress (Anzarclub’s subtitled version, 17 min 6s).

This emancipatory approach to subtitling illustrates the form of civic engagement that Deuze labels as ‘bricolage’, to which I now turn my attention. In the context of our own case study, Piezas is by far the most prominent ‘bricoleur-citizen’ (Deuze, 2006: 70) both within Ansarclub and the network that had previously subtitled Aznar’s HARDtalk interview. Indeed, his digital persona appears to act as a node around which a range of politically engaged groupings and narratives coalesce and rotate, respectively. The collection of videos posted and remediated through his Dailymotion profile,¹⁹ for example, reflect his/her highly critical views of Aznar and (Partido Popular) PP (main conservative party in Spanish politics), global capitalism and bull-fighting, among other concerns. Of particular note is the proportion of material devoted to the coverage of the right-wing ‘11M Conspiracy Theory’ – whose adepts, including Aznar, maintained that Basque terrorists played a major part in the Madrid train bombings on 11 March 2004, possibly in connivance with pro-Socialist members of the Spanish police forces, to oust the ruling PP.²⁰ The importance of Piezas’ opposition to this intersecting narrative is illustrated by his ownership of a website providing progressive constituencies with a comprehensive ‘repository’ of multimedia coverage on the conspiracy²¹ and his membership of a blog-based collectivity parodying the mainstream right-wing media’s account of the events following the bombings.²²

Both of Piezas’ websites are conceived as assemblages of appropriated and/or annotated media content – showing little concern over objectivity or copyright infringement – as well as hubs of narrative clustering that link to a range of like-minded sites and groupings. Moreover, by making available embedding codes, downloadable files and freeware applications, Piezas and his fellow cocreators engage in shovelwaring, understood as ‘the repurposing or windowing of content across different sites, media, and thus (potential) audiences’ (Deuze, 2006: 70). Shovelwaring prompts the latter to become bricoleur-citizens themselves by reusing manipulated versions of media content. In the era of cocreation fostered by convergence culture, annotating and repurposing global broadcasts through subtitling provides opportunities for reflexive prosumers of media content to step out of their core narrative locations, mobilize additional aspects of their increasingly fluid identity and exercise their right to actualize their political citizenship.

Remediation and bricolage are central to the disjunctive relationships that hold between prosumers and the establishment also in other spheres of the digital media industries. Through the remediation of ‘old’ content by ‘new’ media, the desire of reflective consumers to distance themselves from institutionalized approaches to media is channelled into ‘a more or less deliberate social act – deconstructing and/or subverting symbols, images, and other mediated products of whatever is perceived as “mainstream”’ (Deuze, 2006: 69) within the digital culture.

Conclusion

Although its contribution to the global cultural economy has been overlooked by both media sociologists and globalization theorists, translation (as illustrated by engaged networks of amateur subtitling) is playing a crucial role in the configuration and consolidation of new transnational networks of media content producers and consumers in the era of the digital culture.

As the opening sections of this article have shown, the technological developments that served as a catalyst for this process of media convergence and the ensuing generalization of cocreational media practices can be accounted for in terms of the growing disjuncture between technoscapes, ideoscapes and mediascapes, as conceptualized by Appadurai (1996). Strategies of semantic and pragmatic translation, as defined by Appadurai, facilitate mutual comprehension across languages but, more importantly, are instrumental for the formation of fluid groupings of consumer–creators bound together by affectivity or shared monitorial concerns. Indeed, within these translational communities of interest, audience members – including those who occasionally choose to become involved in cocreational practices – participate in the negotiation of mutual affinity by sharing aspects of their identity. The collectivities that emerge by reflexively assembling and circulating their own representations of reality through media, often by intervening in the conventional dynamics of the audiovisual markets, can thus be described as sites of participation and encounter around an audiovisual text. As is also the case with other participatory practices, translation channels the growing hypersociability at the centre of digital culture. As they are empowered to choose their elective belongings, citizens engaged in the voluntary production and circulation of media content transcend the boundaries of their fragmented private spheres to join bigger building blocks within the wider digital culture.

An important argument that I have tried to elaborate here is that the process of individual reconstitution at the heart of strategic translation is expressed in specific forms of participation, remediation and bricolage – that is, some of the main components of digital culture. Of particular note is that the similarities between activist subtitling and other forms of participatory self-mediation are not simply mechanical. As is also the case with networks of citizen journalists, to give but one example, amateur subtitling collectivities are ‘not created and self-maintained through connected devices and access alone’, they also have ‘self-referential properties in that certain values, beliefs, and practices are preferred over others’ (Deuze, 2006: 71). Indeed, my attempt to illustrate the interventionist and monitorist quality of amateur activist subtitling has suggested that, in the era of digital culture, translation can be made to work as a cultural means of resistance by addressing small-scale resistant communities, rather than large audiences clustered around mainstream corporate media. Given its valuable contribution to the process of hypersociability, it is expected that the status of translation as a form of cocreational practice within the wider digital culture will be more difficult to overlook in the future, by scholars both within and outside translation studies.

Footnotes

Notes

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