Chinese translational fandoms: Transgressing the distributive agency of assemblages in audiovisual media

Introduction

On 3 February 2021, news centring on the latest official clampdown on the leading Chinese fansubbing group Ren Ren Ying Shi (also known as YYeTs) went viral on Chinese social media. ¹ While the reasons for such high-profile media coverage will be examined in a separate investigation, it is noticeable that, unlike the sympathy and support conveyed by viewers during previous governmental repercussions (Wang, 2017), support is polarised this time. Some viewers side with the fansubbers, pressing the conflict of interests between copyright, availability of media resources and censorship; conversely, some opinions aggregate around the ethics and legitimacy ² of fan-based distribution and engagement, and their persistent disruption in the domestic media environment. In addition, viewers who align with the latter opinions are calling for further innovation in the domestic media industry to improve openness towards, and better regulation of formal media distribution, specifically the new streaming giants Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and made-in-China platforms such as iQiyi and Tencent Video.

Both sides are unaware of four significant developments in global media exchange and production. First, fan audiovisual translation is evolving on a global scale (Pérez-González, 2019), rather than being a China-specific transgression in contemporary media cultures. Second, while the Chinese authorities decisively suppress domestic fansubbing networks in the name of copyright protection, they praise and encourage the fan-mediated global reach of made-in-China content, such as movies, webnovels, and webseries. Third, the latest revision of internet policy has tightened the surveillance of the Chinese online ecosystem shaped by e-commerce, internet-distributed television, and social media entertainment. ³ Further, many industrial players are seeking to make their services and production more inclusive of dedicated fans, such as the subtitling service on Viki (Baruch, 2021) and the Translation Service on the transnational digital comic platform Line Webtoon (Yecies and Shim, 2021). These factors must be acknowledged when evaluating the rationale and value of fansubbing; fan translators form a crucial force behind syncing Chinese audiences with global entertainment media.

Addressing the fan–media symbiosis in China, Yin (2020) argues that ‘the formalisation of digital fandom participation should be considered a selective legitimisation based on the complex negotiation between sets of fan values and subjectivity as well as commercialised reality’ (2020: 489). Based on the complex entanglement among affect, fan subjectivity, and algorithms of digital fandom, she contends that:

the formalisation of digital fan practice is not constructed merely by fan subjectivity or the so-called industrial rules. It complicatedly involves strong sense of fan agency as well as the cultural structure at the same time. It also indicates how fans mediate the fan–object relationship in use of media and digital technology. (Yin, 2021: 472)

Building on Yin's observation, fansubs are dematerialised ‘transitional objects’ (Hills, 2002; Sandvoss, 2005), created through individual and collective digital participation (Li, 2020). The (co-)creational activities of fans transform the affective intimacy they feel towards the preferred media content ‘to both immaterial labour and emotional return, and even material rewards to which fans can attach themselves’ (Yin, 2020: 478). In contrast to analogue media objects, fansubs are now circulated in digital habitats where translation, remediation, and other affective labourers help to expand the scope of distribution and reception of commercial programmes beyond the charted market territories. The digitised transitional objects revitalise and transform the value of virtual engagement across diverse platform domains where fans seek to open a new ‘intermediate area of affect’ (Winnicott, 2005) for the expanded audienceship. As for fansubbers, their emotional investment in media content allows them to broadcast their affective intermediation through material and immaterial labourers, such as translation, podcasts, reaction videos, official merchandising, and fan-made transitional objects. These affective practices can generate new (symbolic) values for viral media content outside the formal economies of transnational media exchanges, with which local fans have endured cycles of negotiation and resistance (Pérez-González, 2013).

In China, digital fans rarely articulate radical resistance, but can maintain their autonomy facing platform algorithms and authoritative power over the internet. For instance, despite the inability to legally access Netflix, audiences in China have become actively involved in the global Squid Game fandom and rapidly refranchised it within the local online environment (Chow, 2021). Most Chinese audiences joined the recent frenzy of the Korean Wave through the fan-based mediation of the original series. A chain of non-official merchandising emerged in the aftermath of viewing, traversing multiple social media and online trading platforms. Although the Chinese audience can access Netflix through paid illicit services, such as virtual portal network (VPN) apps, most are drawn to the free resources shared on fan translation and rogue streaming websites. Overall, fans can sustain their interactions with each other and their emotional and material investments, values, norms, and algorithms. The role of translation in fan-driven transcultural flows has been overlooked by social media.

Guo and Evans (2020) navigate towards a theory of ‘translational fandom’ with an emphasis on reading media content across languages. Notably, their alliance with (queer) feminist fandoms in China can help moralise the tactical practices of community-building and world-making sought by users-turned-mediators in transnational media exchanges. Media fandoms surviving under digital authoritarianism instantiate the bottom-up politics of overstepping moral and legal boundaries, circumventing the dominant media apparatus, and re-establishing new routes and conventions of engagement. However, transgression in contemporary media culture not only disrupts or topples the system but also ‘allows for discursively and materially reinstating moral frames or, in another example, intellectual property rights’ (Hermes and Hill, 2021: 7). The translational fandom YYeTs conveyed their expectation of acquiring copyright from distributors in an interview with the mainstream youth magazine Youth 100, which is owned by the Chinese internet company Sohu. ⁴ Suffice it to say, fan translators are aware of their precarity but continue to intervene in the disciplined sphere of transnational media distribution. Translational fandoms have not been recognised as prominent sites for transgressive engagement with media content, despite their routes and patterns of engagement aligned with and expanding the myriad of content production and value co-creation explored by recent studies (see also Evans, 2019; Hill, 2021).

This article negotiates the rationale and theoretical implications of fan-based engagement for altering media globalisation and fandom studies, with reference to the affective entanglement of fan translators with algorithmic culture under digital authoritarianism. ⁵ Further, this article situates the non-representational work of fansubbing (Pérez-González, 2012) in ‘the distributed agency of assemblage’ (Lee, 2021b) and aligns it with the theory of ‘digital intermediation’ (Hutchinson, 2021). The article further argues that fansubbing is no longer the sole mechanism for translating global entertainment media on the Chinese internet, as shown by the fan work of translational remix. In this emerging translatorial engagement, media fans transgress linguacultural boundaries to recalibrate distributed media into local domains of prosumption.

The parameters of engagement in Chinese translational fandoms

This section explicates the parameters of engagement in Chinese translation fandoms. Previous research shows that engagement-based media experience involves not only attentive reception but also active participation through response, interpretation, (re)distribution, and (re)valuation (Jenkins et al., 2013). Dahlgren and Hill (2020) identified media context, motivation, modality, intensity, and consequence as the five parameters of media engagement. They wrote:

Our notion of engagement as a nexus informs the specific parameters of media engagement that we offer below. Each parameter seeks to highlight a definitive attribute about media engagement, offering an angle of approach, yet we assume that the parameters work in conjunction with each other. At the same time, in any specific instance of media engagement, some parameters will probably have greater relevance than others and relate to each other in differing configurations. (Dahlgren and Hill, 2020)

China's digital development is strictly controlled and monitored by the authorities. With their consensus with the Party-State, local tech companies, such as Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, maintain a self-contained domestic online ecosystem which facilitates a wide range of video-streaming, e-commerce, and information services to China-based and Chinese consumers (Keane and Yu, 2019; Wang and Lobato, 2019). The Chinese government restrains the implementation of a comprehensive rating system to define the age and gender demographics desirable for specific media content; instead, it continues to appraise domestic and foreign media production based on ideological (un)palatability. Despite this, the Chinese audience still has unfiltered access to global media culture through non-official (often complicit) networks of translation and sharing. Censorship is frequently circumvented by shadow economies of informal distribution, which thrived in China between the late 1970s and the early 2000s and had a sea-change impact on local media life. This is due to the introduction of analogue media technologies and devices, such as television, home video players, DVDs, and emerging media fandoms among urban populations (Wang, 2020).

The persistent influx of translated entertainment media has allowed transcultural fandoms to thrive in video shops, community video projection saloons, and gaming clubs. In parallel with the rampant audiovisual piracy, gaming and film magazines circulated original and translated articles about the latest trends, gaming tips, film reviews, etc. For instance, the once most popular cinephilic magazine Kan Dian Ying (Movie View) had a pamphlet on every issue to inform readers of the latest products in the global (mostly Western) DVD markets. Most of the DVD products introduced by the magazine did not have any official distribution in China but were available in local video stores and clubs which were part of the expanding bootleg network across East and Southeast Asia (see also Wang, 2003).

(2) Motivations refer to the reasons for engaging in specific media programmes in a chosen media context. Such reasons can range from individual views of the content value to the potential impact the attempted engagement can have on broader lived-by realities.

The inception of the internet and digital technologies enables fansubbing networks to thrive despite legal repercussions from the government. In contrast to the mercantilism of audiovisual piracy, those who contribute to fansubbing volunteered for altruistic digital labour in translation and audience engagement. They sidestep the market infrastructure to open and sustain networks of informal distribution. They test and prove the market potential, even though their engagement is not valued by legitimate media. Fansubbers are fringe audiences who are highly engaged with their preferred media content, whereas industries and their licensed broadcasters profit through exploitation, thereby causing audiences to disengage and decreasing viewers’ loyalty. Instead of attracting the attention of the research and marketing division, fansubbers are more often routed to legal sectors that unquestioningly charge them with copyright infringement. That said, piracy is ‘more often a product of market failure on the part of the media industry than of moral failures on the part of media audiences’ (Jenkins et al., 2013: 117). Despite this, the formal sector constantly misses opportunities to align with dedicated and active viewers and fails to recognise the enormous value of their digital labour.

(3) Modality incorporates affective and cognitive modes which may function together in particular media experiences. The affective mode ‘builds upon the affective structures within a genre, particular narrative, or a live event, where through the crafting of engagement we are invited to engage with subjective and emotional issues, personae and characters, or moral dilemmas’ (Dahlgren and Hill, 2020). To engage cognitively, viewers often ‘think through the media about a variety of social, political, and moral issues, or to understand more about a particular problem, reflect on the implications of the problem, and potentially do something about it’ (Dahlgren and Hill, 2020). When viewers respond affectively, they seek further opportunities to participate in their media context, where they act according to personal strategies, social relationships, and individual political/economic status.

Affective and cognitive modes of engagement function together in the processes of curation, translation, circulation, consumption, and interpretation (Lu and Lu, 2021). The workflow of fansubbing often begins with ‘raw providers’, who deliver digital copies of the original content to different translation project teams. The initial copies are converted into different video formats to make the content compatible with the chosen subtitling tools. Time coders and segmentors precisely mark the beginning and end points of each source-language utterance and divide the dialogue into legible lines. The video is then separated into smaller portions for further distribution of subtitling labour. Fansubbers translate the dialogue, render other content-relevant information, and synchronise the subtitles into video clips. The project supervisors are responsible for quality control. After their revisions, the fansubbed clips are assembled to form a completed version which is placed online in different video formats. The fansubs are separately shared as txt. files in two different formats: SubRip text (.srt) and an advanced substation alpha (.ass). The latter often involves additional coding to integrate the subtitles with special visual effects.

(4) Intensity refers to the sustainability and depth of engagement throughout a temporary or long-term experience of given media content. Ephemeral and sustainable engagements animate different activities within and beyond individual places and moments of consumption.

The fan-generated translation will be revised consistently during circulation based on feedback from target audiences motivated to participate in an array of activities on fandom websites and social media. These include rating the fansubbed content, writing content reviews in personal and fan blogospheres, creating videographic essays on original content and sharing them across multiple platforms, and joining fan translation projects.

(5) As for consequence, people who participate in collective viewing, group chats, interpretation, (re)distribution, among others, will reach different outcomes in their media contexts, ranging from affective networks of engagement to the subversion of local and globally connected media apparatuses (see also Evans, 2019).

Navigating in and from their media contexts, fans work jointly to establish alternative points of contact between local audiences and global audiovisual entertainment. Chinese translational fandoms divert media content from their solicited context of circulation to the Chinese audience, who may find the content meaningful and valuable for reasons which are not found in the source context(s) of reception. Currently, translational fandoms sustain the only chance of engaging with uncensored media content. They are dedicated to sync domestic viewers with transnational audiences by granting them greater autonomy in terms of conditioning their individual and collective engagement. As such, they help to ‘close those gaps created by the uneven and unequal circulation of culture, allowing entry into contemporary conversations to which marginalized populations might otherwise be excluded’ (Jenkins et al., 2013: 265).

As shown earlier, fans’ engagement with media content is both transmedia and transgressive. First, they transmigrate the original resources from the host media network into their own online domains through the aforementioned virtual networks. They successfully attract local engagement from niche and everyday viewers who either briefly drop by for specific content or participate in a lasting commitment, specifically when they decide to contribute to translational work. This co-creation requires participants’ intense intellectual input and willing compliance with specific workflows for the punctual delivery of translated content. Second, compared with the subscribed fans who reflexively engage with the content tailor-made for them in officially sanctioned locales, Chinese translational fandoms open and sustain autonomous spaces, thus transgressing mainstream apparatuses of consumption on the local and global scales, specifically, through tactical practices such as community-building, identity negotiation, circumventing content ownership, and digital self-defensive techniques in response to governmental repercussions (Wang and Zhang, 2017). By negotiating the excursus of translation and distribution, translational fandoms ‘emerge [and evolve] through an interactive process whereby intersubjectivity is constructed through the community participants’ voluntary engagement with media content and other people’ (Lee, 2021a: 6).

Transgressive engagement can additionally be achieved through fans’ world-making activities, as revealed by Guo and Evans (2020) in their analysis of the now defunct queer feminist translational fandom Ji Hua (or lesssub). Noticeably, whereas lessub has a clearly designated social agenda of intervening in local heteronormative media and gender politics, most Chinese translational fandoms work with a greater variety of genres, facilitating interactions between fansubbing communities, fansubbed media, and viewers, and assisting them to voice individual and collective opinions across social media and cultural platforms. Engaging voluntarily with ‘an intrinsically motivated pursuit’ (Mattar, 2008: 354), Chinese translational fandoms not only address their audiences through interlingual subtitling, but also (re)assemble a wide range of meanings and experiences from the existing cultural and medial spheres and adapt them to the subtitling medium. This is illustrated in the context of the Chinese fansubbing.

The distributive agency of assemblages in fansubbing

This section illustrates the creative strategies of Chinese fansubbing and the intersectional practice of fan translators in official cinematic subtitling. Their works instantiate the operandi modus of ‘assemblage’ – as conceived by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to envisage ‘complex constellations of objects, bodies, expression, qualities, and territories that come together for varying periods of time to ideally create new ways of functioning’ (Livesey, 2010: 18). Building on this, Hayles (2005) uses ‘work as assemblage’ to encompass the cohort of translation-origin fluidity, in which ‘[e]verything is simultaneously a translation of everything else, each united to the others in a rhizomatic network without a clear beginning or end’ (Hayles, 2005: 115). Fluidity instigates an equal partnership between translators and authors ‘in the constant pursuit of meaning-in-dispersal and in the co-construction of a work-in-distribution’ (Lee, 2021b: 20). More importantly, it points to fans’ engagement with media content through translations.

Interlingual subtitling projects the textual representation of source-language communication to the new audience of a target language (Guillot, 2020). The task of the subtitler is to reconcile the tension between the diegetic interaction between on-screen speakers and the extra-diegetic information flows between the translated film and target audience (Messerli, 2019). However, subtitling involves more complex intercultural mediation, through which subtitlers interpret source information in terms of suitable target-language solutions. The presentation of source and target information imposes intersecting language complexes on target audiences. In both the production and reception of subtitling, there are medium-specific factors, such as spatial and temporal constraints, affecting the legibility and readability of translation, ⁶ while subtitlers and audiences may access the pragmatic idiosyncrasy of the translated information differently. In response to this, subtitlers converge language translation with wide-ranging communicative resources to help target audiences cope with the pluri-semiotic information flowing towards them (Guillot, 2020).

Recent research observes mediation in extradiegetic domains in which the cross-cultural and interpersonal effects of subtitling undergo further negotiation among viewers who may perceive subtitling as a matter of interpretation. Venuti (2019) confronts the long-standing instrumentalism in subtitling research, which he believes prevents current scholarship from more hermeneutic approaches to assessing (1) the subtitler's estimations of interplay among the audiences, scenes, and actions enacted in the original and its referenced source culture(s) and (2) the subtitler's phrasing, which persuades the recipients to accept a particular interpretation and pre-empt others. Venuti (2019: 135) argues that the source information is ‘rewritten in the translating language and comes to possess different constitutive features that can support different meanings, values, and functions in the receiving culture’. To Venuti (2019), instrumentalism confines the work of subtitling to the reductive rendering of dialogic and narrative information, and hinders researchers and practitioners from exploring ‘the theoretical sophistication and imaginative resourcefulness that would be much more appreciative of the potential effects of subtitles’ (2019: 174). Yet, in making their ‘interpretive moves’, to follow Venuti's usage, subtitlers and audiences will delve beyond the subtitling medium to participate in a range of meaning-making and social activities. This is typically maintained in fansubbing, in which additional information is communicated through various annotative works.

In a move largely dismissed by professional practice, fansubbers choose to insert contextual and cultural information that is not explicitly conveyed by the original but can help audiences understand culturally and generically specific information. Their translation of verbal information (dialogue, written signs, lyrics, etc.) usually include ‘headnotes’, which appear at the top of the screen simultaneously with the translation of source-language information, or ‘tailnotes’, which are placed next to a subtitle. These explanatory notes can also appear with more flexible positioning and different colouring and font styles in correspondence with the visual surroundings and textual design of the displayed verbal information. Annotative works can be more intrusive when the fansubber deliberately sacrifices visual coherence on the screen. For instance, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2016) contains an ‘easter egg’, which shows a portrait of Howard Stark (i.e. Iron Man's late father). In the fansubbed version shared by YYeTs, this displayed information is explained to viewers by a note which appears in white and next to an arrow pointing to the portrait. In doing so, the fansubber not only makes an intervention but also fulfils what Pérez-González (2012) considers ‘non-representational subtitling’. Pérez-González writes:

[S]ubtitles are acts, events, happenings, and they should not be primarily evaluated according to their referentiality or degree of correspondence with pre-existent meaning or communicative intentions, but on the basis of their affective contribution to the materiality of audio-visual texts and their transformational impact on the audience's experience of self-mediated textualities. (Pérez-González, 2012: 348)

In China, translators tend to omit or alter culturally and ideologically sensitive or tabooed information, but simultaneously seek to creatively render relevant content to guarantee access to the local audience. This is discussed in length by the former fan translator Bowen Fu (2017) with reference to his solution for ‘scrotum hat’ in Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2. Traditionally, it is widely accepted that taboo references, swearwords, and expletive interjections are often euphemised, toned down, or omitted due to spatial constraints and sociocultural factors which restrict offensive usage in the media (Díaz-Cintas and Remael, 2021: 189). Rendering these elements has been one of the most prominent ‘forms of subversion and resistance that fansubbers pursue’ (Khoshsaligheh et al., 2018: 676). Fu is fully aware of this and actively draws on his previous experience as a founding member of the translational fandom Huai Xiu Bang (Y Show Club) to mobilise between the formal and informal contexts of audiovisual translation.

The Chinese subtitle would have been one-character shorter than Fu's translation if the English phrase had been rendered by its Chinese equivalent 阴囊 (yin nang). However, the movie would be declined by censors due to the explicit reference to the male body part. To secure the film’s cinematic exhibition, Fu adopted a double entendre, ‘裹蛋皮’ (guo dan pi; thin flatbreads for wrapping eggs), to create a pun that is phonetically identical to ‘果单皮’ (guo dan pi), a sweet and sour snack made of thorn apples and beetroots, which remains highly popular in China. The translation makes the taboo connotation less explicit but simultaneously accessible to target audiences. They may also appreciate the enhanced humorous effect of the source information, which is performed by the character Rocket to mock his enemy. Fu's hybrid translatorial identity allows him to intersect the official and non-official domains of tactical subtitling. As a former fan translator, he is familiar with the creative strategy of homonymic substitution, which is frequently applied by fansubbers to translate offensive languages (Wang 2021). As a Chinese citizen born after the 1978 economic reform, he shares the cultural memory of the popular food product called ‘果单皮’ (guo dan pi) and creatively transforms the food name into a playful and acceptable (at least to the censors) version of the unpalatable source information. Taken together, Fu assembles from linguistic, medial, and social spheres that intersect with his life experience to translate the original for local media.

It is worth emphasising that the translatorial engagement with the MCU undertaken by Fu (2017) traverses a cohort of transmedia resources. To cope with the characterisation of The Ancient One in Dr Strange (2016), Fu draws on media texts circulated on multiple social and mainstream media sites in which media producers, filmmakers, comic artists, and fans wrote or talked about their understanding of that character; the information was mainly written in English and Chinese. Besides the media paratexts, Fu seeks to project his own depiction of the mythic character in his translation by importing speech styles from Chinese xian xia (a Chinese variation of the fantasy genre, which combines martial arts, romance, and mythology, among other traditional and popular genres) webnovels. Fu observes the resemblance between The Ancient One and xian xia characters who possess superior magical powers and sophisticated knowledge of nature and other-worldly dimensions. Although Fu did not further explain his motivation for this solution, his translation nevertheless re-appropriated the whitewashed character for reception in China. By meshing the Marvel character's cinematic persona with the linguistic traits indigenous to Chinese digital culture, Fu brings the character closer to the comic-book origins where The Ancient One is frequently portrayed as an Asian man rather than a Caucasian woman. ⁷

As a prominent translation strategy of fansubbing, the intercultural mashup allows fansubbers to navigate between the spheres of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the domestic and the foreign, the mediated and the unmediated, and all existing medialities without confining their manoeuvring to any linear source-to-target passage. This meaning-making operation corresponds with the ontological shift from ‘translating between’ to ‘translating among’ (Baer, 2021) and to ‘the distributive agency of assemblages’ in which ‘authors and translators, originals and translations must be understood as processes in flux rather than discrete persons or objects vying for discursive control’ (Lee, 2021a: 19). Transgressing the author–translator and source–target divides, translation as distributed work can ‘add value to the original texts by drawing on linguistic and semiotic resources not available to or not accessed by the original’ (2021a: 19).

The intercultural mediation of fansubbing represents fertile ground to further verify this speculation. As an outcome of mashup and assemblage, ‘I like her’ in Young Sheldon (2018: season 2, episode 2,) is translated as ‘ben gong xi huan’ in the YYeTs's version. The line is spoken by Sheldon's sister Missy, when his classmate comes to play in their house for the first time. Chinese fansub signifies more than the literal meaning of source information. This is reminiscent of archaic usage in popular historical dramas set in ancient Chinese imperial palaces. The term ‘ben gong’ is used by female members of royal families to refer to themselves. When it is used in the subtitle of an American sitcom set in the early 1990s, ben gong can elicit stronger empathy from target audiences whose media life on domestic television is permeated with conspiracies, power struggles, and time travellers in imperial palaces. Hence, the use of ben gong (instead ‘wo’, the equivalent of ‘I’) superimposes a cross-generic assemblage onto the screen to mesh the translated text and the domestic media genre alluded to with the foreign image, diverting any straight, linear passage from a single, fixed original to the subtitle.

The above shows that the process of translation is rhizomatic, assembling a multi-scalar information flow across cultures and media to open original works to further transformation and alternative interpretations, which are derived from, but also alien to, the originals and their contexts of production. In Chinese translational fandoms, creative labourers have delved beyond audiovisual and textual translations. Taking momentum from the technogenesis of ‘digital intermediation’ (Hutchinson, 2021), Chinese fans are seeking more transgressive engagement with media content through translational remix.

Translational remix

This final section illustrates how the practice and production of ‘translational remix’ (Wang, in press) furthers the work of translation fandoms in the linguacultural domains of digital intermediation. By arranging and fitting together the found digital objects into new assemblages, remixing allows fans to find new pathways to close the gap that separates the real of their [the fans’] own experience and the fictional space of their favourite programs (Jenkins, 1992: 76), and to share the pleasure of audiovisual text with like-minded peers. Essentially, creators of remix (remixers) not only temper the image but also re-work the temporal duration and sequences to create hybrid narratives that intersect languages, cultures, and media. Remixers ‘take cultural artifacts and combine and manipulate them into new kinds of creative blends’ (Knobel and Lankshear, 2008). The outcome usually represents ‘a digital utterance expressed across the registers of the verbal, the aural, and the visual’ (Kuhn, 2012), that the creators of such videos (i.e. remixers) tend to appropriate in order to de-/re-contextualise media content for the creation of new meanings. In recent years, the rapidly expanding remixed content, genres, user-generated data, and platform technologies have been harnessed by Chinese remixers for intercultural remediation and interpretation of narrative media.

Some works of translation remix last less than 5 minutes, while others are the length of a feature film when the remixer conducts in-depth analyses of a given audiovisual (non-)fiction. Their straightforward access to contextual information and speculations on specific plotlines are absent from official and other fan-mediated translations. For instance, the Singapore-based remixer Da Cong (username) is prolific in producing video reviews and film criticism. He shares the videos on his YouTube channel, Da Cong Kan Dian Ying (Da Cong Watching Films) and remediates them into written texts for circulation on his public WeChat account. The creator of the YouTube channel Yue Ge Shuo Dian Ying (Brother Yue Talks Films) talks about films in vernacular Chinese with a refined essayistic style. His narration and analysis are accompanied by slow and elegant background music. Most of the films discussed by Yue Ge are works of renowned filmmakers, such as Joel and Ethan Coen, David Fincher, Jia Zhangke, Giuseppe Tornatore, Wong Kar-Wai, and Zhang Yimou.

In comparison, on the channel Niu Shu Shuo Dian Ying (Uncle Ox's Movie Talks), the remixer going under the alias of Niu Shu speaks in a north-eastern Chinese dialect and transforms all the film narratives into melodramatic pastiches which blend the original storylines with Chinese cultural elements. The remixer usually adapts the names of the characters in a Chinese television drama, Xiang Cun Ai Qing (Village Love Stories, 2012), broadcast on various China Central Television channels, for all the analysed films, regardless of their original characterisations, contexts, or languages. In this way, Niu Shu refashions distributed media objects for the local and individualised context of communication with online audiences. His works are identical to what Navas (2012: 162) calls ‘regenerative remix’ – a discursive (re-)working of existing media content which is ‘embedded materially in culture in nonlinear and ahistorical fashion’. Rooted in networked culture, regenerative remix allegorises but also subverts the sources for the practical validation of its functionality ‘in keeping with the fluidity of digital media’ (Ng, 2020: 278).

Take Niu Shu's work on the dystopian sci-fi thriller Race (2008) for instance. ⁸ The spliced footage of the source film was stitched with the remixer's vernacular retelling. The re-worked story is set in an imagined aftermath of the US–China Trade war, which forced the US into another economic depression. The protagonist Jensen Garner Ames is renamed Yong Qiang, Ames's competitor Joseph ‘Machine Gun Joe’ Mason becomes Yu Tian, and the villain Claire Hennessey becomes Xie Da Jiao (The Big Feet Xie), for example. Above all, the fictional Death Race, a live-streaming, real-person racing game, which allows the contestants to equip their cars with lethal weapons to kill each other in order to win the prize, is dubbed into ‘si wang ban de QQ fei che’ (a deadly violent version of GKART), which connects the film narrative with a video game released by the Chinese tech giant Tencent. Taken together, the remix displays a new and unexpected connection between fiction and reality, as well as the source and target contexts of reception, to spread a new story consisting of elements borrowed from propagandist and popular media.

The creation and circulation of translational remix is situated in an online environment that incorporates platforms, social media influencers, and increasingly sophisticated algorithms (Hutchinson, 2020: 1285). Hutchinson (2021: 1) argues that digital intermediation cannot be realised in technocentric virtual spheres but should always be a ‘content production and consumption process that incorporate the cultural characteristics of technologies, agencies and automation’. Although Hutchinson focuses primarily on digital cultural industries and their affiliated users-turned-creators, digital intermediation is also prominent in translational remix. Different modes and modalities are assembled into a given source work to redistribute it as a new function of production-consumption (prosumption), the processing of which instantiates the difference and convergence between choreographed and emergent writing as conceived by Lee (2021c). Choreographed writing is instrumental, prescribing – from the outside and top-down – macro-level affairs, such as the institutional design of urban spaces, the implementation of policies for languages and communication, and large-scale management. By contrast, emergent writing arises from within, to enable bottom-up, self-oriented engagement with or subversion of prescribed practices or canonical works (Lee, 2021c: 38). Despite this, the two categories of writing are not always mutually exclusive but operate concomitantly to underpin the complexity of ‘engaging multiple domains and articulating myriad desires simultaneously’ (Lee, 2021c: 58).

Translational remixers tactically engage with a top-down mode of consumption and share existing communicational repertoires for enriched (and sometimes subversive) story (re)telling. Simultaneously, they maintain a bottom-up mode of user production, by which they make the chosen media infinitely programmable and, hence, emergent to affective processes of digital intermediation among fan remixers, digitised media objects, agential networks of creative industries, platform algorithms, and the dominant media context. Through hybrid functioning, the assemblage of translational remix instigates new routes and patterns of engagement by transgressing various intersections between linguacultures, media, and imagined storytelling worlds. Conversely, by spreading their work on participatory platforms such as YouTube, Bilibili, Red, and WeChat, translational remixers take the liberty to promote their products and channels, and seek further communication with disparate online audiences. As such, translational remix traverses the interpretative, interactive, and speculative domains of fan-based media engagement through choreographic-emergent processing of digital intermediation.

Expressly, what is being translated through digital intermediation from existing media content into remixed videos? How is the act of remixing making use of linguacultural and semiotic signs by navigating them ‘fluidly among and across media’ (Hayles, 2005: 197)? Long before digitisation, in ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, Walter Benjamin (2006: 105) proposed that an original work radiates ‘a strange weave of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be’ that he called ‘aura’. Despite his awareness of the unprecedented increase in cultural productiivty and outreach, Benjamin insisted that the authenticity of the original cannot be retained in the mass distribution beyond its spatial-temporal root.

Authenticity is designated differently in different translational fandoms. Narrative content is digitised, distributed, and streamed through virtual networks of media companies, fan collectivities, and individual viewers. Translational remixers intermediate rather than replicate the distributed media objects and adapt them to the cohort of entanglements between speech, writing, and static and animated visual works, among other medialities. Rather than merely reusing found digital objects, they seek to exploit the existing creative repertoire for the transformative creation of a digital aura. Spreading in the online space, a digital object is given the status of both the original and its copy, as each viewing can afford a unique path to the original meaning and story which possesses an aspect of the aura that preserves authenticity. Translational remixers transform the digital aura by transcending the tension and interactivities between patterned consumption and transgressive (re)production. In doing so, new and malleable digital objects such as translational remix revitalise the digital aura of media works.

Conclusion

In response to the government crackdown on Chinese translational fandom and the subtantial and aggregated social media attention focused on Ren Ren Ying Shi (YYeTs), this article delves beyond the antagonism of freedom versus suppression, availability versus copyright, amateurism versus professionalism, innovation versus exploitation, and so on, to recalibrate typological and theoretical frameworks for further scholastic engagement with translational fandom. In addition to the parameters of fan-based engagement with translation and distribution, the above exploration has demonstrated the distributive agency of assemblage mobilised by the translating fans. The cohort who have been functioing with and through work as assemblage has shown new pathways to engage and sync with global entertainment media. Instead of arguing about the applicability of fan translation strategies to professional practice, this article delves into the excursus of intermediation that traverses and assembles distributed media while departing from the borms of most textual and audioviusal translation. The language use and annotative work of fansubbing are re-evaluated here as redistribution and assemblage of source information, lived experiences, and interactivities between content, translators, and audiences of fansubbing, rather than linear source-to-target transmission. As is typical, the fansubbed content undergoes post-translational repercussions in the nascent medium of translational remix.

Bearing the above discussion in mind, how does the creation and circulation of translation remix open new domains of emotional life in and with audiovisual media? Yin (2020: 476) observes an emerging algorithmic fandom culture in ‘the ongoing interaction between affect, fan subjectivity, and the algorithm [which] continually shapes and reshapes everyday fan practice in terms of its sequence of actions, norms, and ways of thought’. Building on this, future studies should investigate four ideas: (1) how the translating fans continue to make sense of their affective attachment towards the preferred media contents; (2) how their connective labours entangle with both the external domain of social interaction based on shared pleasure and desire and the internal processes of meaning-making centred on personal feelings; (3) how ‘fan affect’ (Grossberg, 1992) enables individual fans to cultivate their media life, negotiate their intimacies with the engaged media content, and participate in collective world-making in response to the perceived realities; and (4) the extent to which fan-translatorial creativity is shaped by the affective subjectivity of individual fans and their interactions with platform infrastructures. It is equally important to explore how fans leverage their compliance with and exploitation – be it tactically or unintentionally achieved – of algorithmic functions to resist authoritative control and search for deeper intermediation with and through the distributive agency of assemblage.