On categorising online collaborative translation and the consequences for the field of research

Abstract

Translation Studies possesses a plethora of meta-concepts such as ‘online collaborative translation’, ‘community translation’, ‘volunteer translation’, etc. to refer to phenomena like translation crowdsourcing, fansubbing, fandubbing, etc. The existence of these various meta-concepts reflects an obvious need to categorise and subsume such phenomena under a meta-category. The paper will attempt to explain why this is the case, why categorising in and of itself is vital and how it relates to boundaries and undertaking boundary-work, both crucial processes in academia. The paper will advocate, based on boundary-work, for using ‘online collaborative translation’ as a meta-category and conclude by presenting a conceptual map of this meta-category and its various sub-categorisations.