Streaming, Subbing, Sharing: Viki Global TV

This chapter presents a case study of global TV site Viki (www.viki.com), which offers amateur subtitling in around 200 languages for media from around the world. It focuses on the ways in which fansubbing and fan repurposing of technology has been adopted in the corporate and media industries via crowdsourcing, underscoring the commerce/community tensions that characterise ‘participatory culture’. In its aim to overcome the geopolitical constraints that limit the availability of media in many parts of the globe, Viki deploys a legal, business framework that overrides the national and linguistic biases of professional subtitling and dubbing via the ‘chaos’ of fan agency and interventionist practice. It also pinpoints the critical role played by language and multilingual publics within the evolving dynamics of convergence. Finally, this case study explores claims that fansubbing and other forms of community translation may be contributing to the ongoing marginalisation of linguistically diverse publics by enabling industry players to continue to underserve minor language communities.

Fansubbing and Abuse: Anime and Beyond

This chapter focuses on the emergent, participatory practice of fansubbing (‘fan subtitling’), examining its origins within anime subculture and its ongoing evolution. Fansubbing is examined as an informal translation practice that emerged as a subset of media piracy with its own ethical standards and rules of conduct. Much early anime fansubbing focused on redressing the domesticating tendencies of professional services, and in this sense highlighted the gatekeeping, controlling function of translation. Hence, this case study further demonstrates links between piracy, censorship and subversion introduced in the previous chapter. It also demonstrates how fansubbing’s intervention into screen media points to the growing significance of translation as a mode of cultural participation responsive to the intensifying multilingualism of global media and technologies. Fans are discussed as ‘lead-users’ of new technologies that trial functionality and uncover emergent uses, demands and desires along the way—exemplifying the increasingly active and unruly ways in which people currently consume and engage with media. Proposing that fansubbing’s communal, errant tendencies are vital to its re-evaluative function, this chapter identifies a point of difference between the reconceptual program of this book and the notion of ‘abusive subtitling’ (Nornes 1999).

Dubbing Undone: Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973)

This chapter explores how dubbing has been deployed as a mode of deliberate, self-reflexive mistranslation. Can Dialectics Break Bricks? flaunts translation dysfunction as a deliberate strategy of political or aesthetic intervention, challenging the authority of authorship and ‘originals’ in the process. Engaging extensively with the notion of ‘abusive translation’ developed by Derrida and updated by Abe Markus Nornes, it demonstrates how errant forms of screen translation evade theoretical containment, and indicate a path for revaluation firmly grounded by the ‘practical’. Parodic mistranslation or deconstructive dubbing, it proposes, presents an overly abusive example of screen translation that indicates how quality considerations are insufficient for engaging with improper modes of practice. It also introduces issues relating to translation censorship and media piracy foreshadowed by the parody dynamics at play in Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

Media Piracy, Censorship and Misuse

This chapter proceeds by detailing two important fields of subtitling and dubbing practice that involve deliberate mistranslation and/or misuse, where quality concerns are overshadowed by politics and policing. Censorship and piracy deploy subtitling and dubbing to radically different ends, intersecting with errant value politics in both unregulated and over-regulated contexts. Together, they indicate the excessive and far-reaching impact of errancy on everyday practices of screen translation. Focusing on pragmatic considerations, this chapter explores how censorship regularly infiltrates professional audiovisual translation operations, and how pirate subtitling and dubbing violates copyright laws, industry regulations and professional translation norms alike while drawing attention to non-Western and non-English speaking contexts as sites of geopolitical contestation. It concludes that screen translation practices associated with censorship and piracy are particularly prevalent within global media flows, as distribution, access and engagement become increasingly decentralised and/or communal.

Sub/Dub Wars: Attitudes to Screen Translation

Focusing on the polarising nature of sub/dub debates, this chapter provides an overview of attitudes and approaches to screen translation both within and beyond screen culture. Dominating the little attention paid to translation within Anglophone Screen Studies, and shaping much research within Translation Studies, sub/dub wars encapsulate the entangled prejudices and value politics that beset the field. This chapter revisits insightful arguments posed by New York Times critic Bosley Crowther during his anti-subtitle campaign, before expanding the frame of reference for this debate by turning to Translation Studies and national screen translation preferences beyond the Anglo-American context.

Conclusion: Error Screens

In summary, this book proposes that improper sites of subtitling and dubbing provide a key to revaluing translation’s role within screen culture broadly. By analysing a range of emergent practices, Speaking in Subtitles has explored ‘errancy’ as a fault line rapidly spreading across the surface of contemporary screen translation, transferring attention away from endless, unresolvable debates on ‘quality’ towards the geopolitics that determine and delimit value systems in the first place. The concrete translation practices explored in this book identify language diversity as a major trajectory within digital and online modes of media engagement. Paying attention to improper sites of subtitling and dubbing provides a crucial key, it argues, to revaluing translation’s role within screen culture broadly—these ‘error screens’ are central, not peripheral, to screen culture as the risks of linguistic and cultural mutation that attend interlingual translation keep films, TV programs and other forms of screen media circulating, evolving and living-on.

Vanishing Subtitles: The Invisible Cinema (1970–4)

This case-study chapter focuses on the blanket rejection of both subtitling and dubbing at New York’s short-lived Invisible Cinema, established by Anthology Film Archives in the early 1970s. In resurrecting the silent-era dream of non-translation, the Invisible Cinema drew attention, paradoxically, to translation’s centrality for screen culture generally and Anthology in particular – pinpointing the re-evaluative role that translation plays in screen culture by keeping ‘originals’ in circulation and contention. This point is affirmed by Anthology’s present-day operations and the residual legacy of its translation ban. Additionally, the chapter explores how the Invisible Cinema’s excessive zero-tolerance approach to translation actually takes certain pro-subtitling arguments to their logical conclusion and is hence ripe for deconstruction. Hence, this chapter outlines a route for revaluation developed further in subsequent chapters, identifying the flaws and failures of screen translation as necessary to the preservation and destabilisation of screen culture.

Introduction

Detailing the intimate relationship that cinema and related screen media enjoy with foreignness and language difference, this introductory chapter argues that language and translation have been systematically overlooked within Screen Studies, yet are set to become major areas of interest as online technologies reshape the global mediascape, affecting modes of access and engagement, redirecting content flows and challenging copyright regulations.