Making sense of trans-translating in blogger subtitling: a netnographic approach to translanguaging on a Chinese microblogging site

Abstract

The online digital sphere has recently witnessed a rapid growing of amateur audiovisual translation, which not only reinvigorates the current body of translation scholarship but also calls for a paradigm shift from the entrenched monolingualism. Though a plethora of studies have been conducted on fansubbing, little is known about blogger subtitling. Drawing on the netnographic data from a subtitling video blogger, @暴躁鸭仔 (baozao yazai, Grumpy Duckling for English) on a microblogging site (Weibo) in the mainland of China, we explored trans-translating by examining the translanguaging involved in the blogger’s subtitling translation. It is revealed that the blogger makes a hybrid, integrated use of multiple semiotic, orthographic, discursive and modal resources, without being confined by the boundaries amongst nameable languages, or linguistic/non-linguistic codes. The orchestration of the unified heterolingual repertoire builds up a social-media translanguaging space, wherein the tensions between translation and translanguaging due to distinct conceptual schemas are manipulated to yield synergy insofar as they dovetail into ingenious language making. We concluded that such creative translation can be retheorized as a process of trans-translating to encapsulate the subtitling experience in light of its dynamic and fluid nature, and transformative power of translanguaging. The results of this research might add to the picture of amateur subtitling and translation and that of translanguaging as well as their relation to one another.