ACIAC Seminar - Virtual Communities of Fansubbing Practice in Contemporary China: Translation, Remediation and Resistance

This seminar explores fansubbing, subtitling translation done by fans for fans (Díaz-Cintas and Sanchez 2006), in terms of its cultural, socio-political and technological entanglements with the digital publics of China. Collaborating amateur subtitlers intervene what used to be an officially monopolised field of Audiovisual Translation with a bid to defy the tight state ideological and political control while forging a mechanism of self-defence to protect themselves from state interference. They assemble an audience of “affective receptivity” (Pérez-González 2017, 3) under “post-cinematic conditions” where the dissemination of moving image reaches “beyond the classical dispositive of the cinema” (Hediger 2016, 20). Together, they are building virtual communities of informal popular-culture practice in order to carry on their aesthetic and political resistances through remediating and adaptive practices such as: cinephilic bricolage, (illicit) appropriation of commercial audiovisual products, and activist ad-hocracies.

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