An Investigation Into The Chinese Fansub Group For American TV Series:Their Collaboration And Motivation

With the prevalence of the Internet,frequent cultural exchange and the popularization of foreign movies or TV series have brought about a number of radical shifts in the way audiences process information and view media.They no longer simply remain passive receptors of products but have instead acted as active co-creators who are equally joining in subtitle making while consuming it.One of the results is the emergence of a group of fansubbers who coordinate on the Internet relay chat(IRC)where fansubbers work collaboratively to subtitle foreign TV series and put them online for free downloading.The fansub group,as a folk spontaneous fans organization,refers to those members who put their native language subtitle to the foreign films or TV series and manage to meet the demand of netizens who would watch the foreign media products in near real-time.Fansubbers come from all walks of life with no systematic training,but sometimes their creative translations attract numerous fans.With the development of translation studies,roles played by translators in the translation activities have been drawing more academic concern.Meanwhile,the proliferation of grassroots translator as an online social group begins to be reflected upon.From the perspective of sociology and translator studies,the present thesis focuses on fansubbers,especially with more stress on their collaboration and motivation.Through the methods of participant observation in a certain fansub group,online interview and questionnaire survey,the author collects data about the constitution of these fansubbers in group to find that translation activity is no longer limited to professional translators,but accessible to people from all walks of life.The author records the workflow of the fansub group to find out the whole process is made up of raw provider,timer,translator,proofreader,encoder and uploader.Besides,the present paper also manages to explore how the fansubbers collaborate and work together with non-professional translation platform to produce amazing subtitles in the light of roles in a practical project,including a team administrator,translators and proofreaders.Finally,the author figures out why people volunteer their time and efforts to be engaged in fansubbing as volunteers and categorizes it into intrinsic motivation and external motivation.The motivations are further analyzed by using Pierre Bourdieu's sociological concepts of “capital”.Through a deep understanding of fansubbing process,it can better explain the non-professionals as an online social group and its translation activity.The present study is a tentative attempt to research on non-professional translator and their activity in academic field,and hence it is hoped that this paper can be taken as a reference for unprofessional translator studies in audiovisual translation as an academic discipline to explore their working mode,organizational structure,translation motivation and the difference between volunteer translator and professional translators.