The rules of the game: on the interplay between normative ideas and technology in an online amateur translation community

Abstract

In recent years, translation researchers have paid increasing attention both to the social dynamics within translation communities as well as to how members of these communities view their own translation practices and the normative ideas they formulate for their activities. In this article, I adopt a diachronic perspective by focussing on the processes of construction, negotiation and consolidation of normative ideas on translation and community in an online amateur translation community. Based on a virtual ethnography in a self-organised community of amateur translators, I explore how its members navigate often conflicting ideas of what it means to translate and of what kind of community they want to be. I try to retrace how some ideas meet with resistance while others are agreed upon and eventually established as formalised ‘rules’. Drawing on ‘technography’, a framework from science and technology studies, particular focus is laid on the role of the technology behind the community. In this context, the article shows how the technological design of a community can play a vital part in shaping, consolidating and enforcing the normative views of translation held by amateur translators.