Translation and New(s) Media: Participatory Subtitling Practices in Networked Mediascapes

This chapter sets out to investigate the role that amateur translation plays in the process of media convergence and gauge the extent to which the proliferation of co-creational practices pertaining to the production, translation and distribution of subtitled media content blur the distinction between the roles of producer and consumer in political news interviews. I begin by exploring how the role of translation within global news media has been theorized in recent years and teasing out the implications of technological changes for the blurring of news production, consumption and translation. I then focus on the social processes that have prompted the emergence of amateur communities of journalists/translators, whether in the form of structured activist networks or fluid groupings of engaged citizens, as influential agents in the digital mediascape. The chapter then articulates the implications of these developments for the discipline of translation studies, including the shift from referential accuracy towards narrative negotiation and the politics of affinity as the main drives informing amateur news mediation. The issues raised in this essay are illustrated with a case study involving the subtitling of a political news interview by amateur mediators.