ABSTRACT
While digital distribution technologies, such as streaming, have allowed significantly more access to foreign media in translation, they have also created a marketplace that is overflowing with new and older materials. The creation of new media content has a large environmental footprint due to travel to locations, recording technologies, postproduction and CGI, etc., while at the same time, the typical workflow of production companies requires staff to take short-term contracts or be paid by project, a practice that is also very common in the translation industry. Translation is a significant part of the postproduction of media content and essential for the distribution of shows beyond their locales of origin. If the production of both media and content is environmentally damaging and relies on short-term labour, how then might there be a way to increase sustainability in the media and translation industries, both in the environmental sense and in the social sense? This paper explores the Albert scheme in the UK for environmental sustainability first before looking at Slow Media practices as ways of creating a more sustainable model of media production and consumption, before asking how already existing archives, such as the Korean Film Archive, might help contribute to slow and sustainable practices. The reuse of older media content offers a way of reducing an environmental footprint, as well as work for translators and the possibility of a wider engagement with the source culture. However, it cannot function alone: there must be new material also being produced in order to generate an archive for the future.
