ABSTRACT
Online collaborative translation, whether it is in Chinese cyberspace or beyond, is a social activity that takes place on the internet. However, it is often overlooked in the literature of Chinese internet research and those in media studies that online translation is also an important form of participatory practice that drives the circulation and consumption of media content in the digital space. In this chapter, I make a bold attempt to situate online collaborative translation at the intersection of three fields of inquiry, i.e. Chinese internet, participatory culture, and translation studies. I argue that online collaborative translation is a day-to-day online activity to which the participants give meaning. Similar to other forms of online life, the emergence of online collaborative translation is underpinned by a participatory culture and media convergence in which the traditionally positioned media content spectators are empowered to proactively express themselves, engage in civic activities, share knowledge and circulate collectively created media content. Nonetheless, China’s integration into the international media convergence is with Chinese characteristics, significantly influenced by the country’s economic, social and cultural transformations in a postsocialist era. In this chapter, I highlight three paradoxes in this regard. First, although China has reformed and opened up since 1978, control over the media and foreign influence has always been tight. The imported media content available in print and state-administered TV channels is carefully selected and mostly transedited. Second, whilst there is a World Wide Web, internet users in China do not always enjoy it in its entirety. Third, the Chinese internet is huge, vibrant and diverse, but, internationally, there is a big discrepancy between the internet content available in Chinese (1.5%) and the population of Chinese-speaking users (19.4%). As a result, people who are curious about the outside world and eager to learn about alternative stories and those who simply want to make foreign content available in Chinese have opted for digital media and technologies. They gather together in online communities to “discover, translate and share the essence of the internet in languages other than Chinese” (Yeeyan 2019).
