ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 presents a sociologically informed discussion of how we holistically understand online translation communities, the practice of online collaborative translation and the social actors engaging in such practice, leading to a theoretical framework that can be used to examine similar social phenomena. A series of concepts about community will be introduced, including the distinction between community and society (Tönnies 1957[1887]), online community (Rheingold 2000), discourse community (Swales 1990), and communities of practice (CoPs) (Wenger 1998; Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner 2015). By combining elements from these approaches, I develop a CoP framework that can be used to study collaborative translation and online translation communities. Drawing on a CoP framework, I theorise Yeeyan and potentially other online translation communities as online CoPs where a group of translators from different professional and disciplinary backgrounds interacts with each other regularly for the shared practices they are passionate about and for the shared enterprises they care for. During this process, they learn how to do things better as they negotiate what meanings to give to individual behaviours as well as collective ‘regimes of competence’. This definition functions as the foundation for an analysis of online collaborative translation from the three dimensions of a CoP, viz. ‘joint enterprise’ (Chapter 4), ‘mutual recognition’ (Chapter 5) and ‘shared repertoire’ (Chapter 7) in the following chapters.
