Amateur subtitling as immaterial labour in digital media culture: An emerging paradigm of civic engagement

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. © The Author(s) 2012.