ABSTRACT
Learning is an essential feature of communities of practice. In this chapter, I analyse online collaborative translation from the perspective of situated learning (Lave and Wenger 1991). I first present the four characteristics of situated learning, viz.: informality, situatedness, co-participation, and sustainability, followed by a discussion of Yeeyan members’ ‘indigenous’ and ‘emergent’ motivations to participate. I then analyse a set of data that showcase how learning is embedded at each stage of textual production during the process of collaboration, as well as the importance of the acquisition of non-translatorial skills in online collaborative translation. At the end of this chapter, I argue that informal situated learning and formal institutional learning share certain characteristics and supplement each other. In the digital age, online collaborative translation has the potential to be further incorporated into translator training.
