[Commlist] CFP: Special issue on Audiovisual Translation in the Age of Streaming

Call for papers for a special issue of Target (vol. 35, 2023)

Audiovisual Translation in the Age of Streaming

Guest Editors: 	Jinsil CHOI ((diane45 /at/ kmu.ac.kr)) Jonathan EVANS 
((jonathan.e.evans /at/ glasgow.ac.uk))
Kyung Hye KIM ((kyunghye.kim /at/ sjtu.edu.cn))

This special issue will investigate the role of translation in the 
rapidly changing and developing environment of global media streaming. 
While there have been calls to ‘recenter globalization’ since the early 
2000s (e.g. Iwabuchi 2002), since the late 2000s the development of 
streaming media has effectively disrupted older linear flow patterns of 
film and media distribution and consumption. There is now globally more 
access in translation to what had been marginalised cultures in the 
global media ecology, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Nigeria. 
In turn, these so-called marginalised cultures in the global media 
ecology, which had been previously largely dominated by Hollywood, now 
enjoy wider access in translation to media cultures which had been much 
less explored or ignored in their home cultures: Korean audiences having 
a greater access to Danish, German, and Spanish media, for instance. 
Streaming service platforms turned content creators such as Amazon, 
Netflix and Rakuten Viki are in the process of overturning previous 
understandings of the global mediasphere and accelerating the dynamics 
of the media landscape, enabling contraflow of media content and 
de/recentering understandings of global media production. Increasingly 
invested in international services, streaming companies’ practices 
fragment, deconstruct and reconfigure media space.

Video streaming sites such as Youtube, where original content is also 
distributed, contribute to this refashioning of media distribution and 
reception and further complicate the relationship between translator, 
content provider and creator.  Yet the process is not limited to 
disruptive new companies: established multinational media and technology 
companies such as Disney and Apple have recently launched new streaming 
services, suggesting that the field is in a constant process of 
reconfiguration as different agents emerge, rise to power or struggle to 
hold market share. The effect of the Covid-19 pandemic has yet to be 
fully understood, but streaming has been a significant part of people’s 
media consumption during lockdown, and is expected to precipitate 
pronounced reconfiguration of the contemporary global media ecosystem. 
While there is a growing body of work on streaming from media studies 
(Dixon 2013; Smith and Telang 2016; Johnson 2018; Lobato 2019; Pallister 
2019), there has been considerably less research on the relationship 
between translation and streaming (with the exceptions of Dwyer 2017; 
Pedersen 2018).

Translation is central to these recent disruptions of the media field, 
as streaming providers offer most media content in translated versions, 
be it dubbed or subtitled, propelling the cultural mobility of media 
content across national and linguistic borders. Netflix, for example, 
functions as a particularly disruptive force by offering an ever wider 
range of genres and non-English language series tailored to specific 
groups of people around the world (Barker and Wiatrowski 2017), to the 
extent that it supported more than 20 languages by 2017 and approached 
“an inflection point where English won’t be the primary viewing 
experience on Netflix” (Netflix 2017). Not all translations on streaming 
platforms are official, and there continue to be thriving fan 
translation cultures on streaming platforms such as Youtube and Viki 
which offer access to media between what Casanova (1999) calls 
‘dominated’ cultures, as well as between ‘dominating’ and ‘dominated’ 
cultures. This increasing fluidity is having a significant effect on 
Anglosphere understandings of world media, which had previously seen 
‘foreign’ film and TV as elite, highbrow productions but now, especially 
through streaming platforms and fansubbing, more popular media such as 
Korean soap operas or Chinese teenage TV dramas are becoming widely 
available. As such, Eurocentric notions of popular media (Shohat and 
Stam 1994) need rethinking to take into account the increasing 
circulation of media products from around the world and the shifting 
balances of soft power (Nye 2004) related to the streaming of media 
content. How, for instance, does access to Chinese soap operas in 
translation affect the image of China in the world and its soft power? 
How does streaming invert and alter previous hierarchies? At the same 
time, the massive abundance of available media around the globe is 
creating a scarcity of attention and affecting a new attention ecology 
(Citton 2017) which risks ‘dominated’ languages and cultures being 
overlooked in the sheer quantity of ‘dominating’ language production. 
How then do streaming and translation filter media for consumers? Are 
streaming services and video sites reinforcing, or challenging, existing 
inequalities of access and distribution through curation and selection 
of languages to translate into? What effect is this having on the 
dominance of ‘global’ English? Importantly, how does the curation of 
media content through translation and streaming promote or silence 
communities such as the LGBT community, the Deaf or ethnic minorities? 
It is not a given that access to media from many different nations will 
be representative of the diversity within those nations. How do notions 
of alterity change in globalised media?
The topic of translation and streaming, then, has significant 
relationships not only with language and contemporary media consumption, 
but also soft power and global understandings of alterity. This special 
issue aims to explore the role of translation in the streaming epoch, 
especially in relation to the shifting definition of 
‘peripheral/dominated’ and ‘central/dominating’ media producing 
cultures. We welcome contributions critically addressing translation 
(understood broadly) in the global media environment that has been 
created in relation to streaming and on demand services. Topics of 
interest include, but are not limited to:
•	Video streaming giants (e.g. Netflix, Amazon) and translation
•	Transnational and translational co-productions for international streaming
•	Shifting notions of centre/dominant and periphery/dominated and ways 
of retheorising the position of cultures in the current media ecology
•	Streaming, translation and the asymmetrical media environment
•	Minoritised groups in translation and streaming media
•	Translation as a form of curation of media
•	Economies of attention, digital distribution and translation
•	Shadow economies of media translation and their effects on global 
circulation
•	South-South or other ‘dominated-dominated’ translation practices (i.e. 
that do not pass through ‘dominant’ languages) for popular media

Please send any queries to the special issue editors, Jinsil CHOI 
((diane45 /at/ kmu.ac.kr)), Jonathan EVANS ((jonathan.e.evans /at/ glasgow.ac.uk)) and 
Kyung Hye KIM ((kyunghye.kim /at/ sjtu.edu.cn)). The deadline for abstracts 
(400-500 words) is 1 February 2021, to be submitted to the special issue 
editors.

References:
Barker, Cory and Myc Wiatrowski (eds) 2017. The Age of Netflix: Critical 
Essays on Streaming Media, Digital Delivery and Instant Access. 
Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Casanova, Pascale. 1999. La République mondiale des lettres. Paris: Seuil.
Citton, Yves. 2017. The Ecology of Attention (trans. Barnaby Norman). 
Cambridge: Polity.
Dixon, Mason Wheeler. 2013. Streaming: Novels, Movies and Instant 
Access. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.
Dwyer, Tessa. 2017. Speaking in Subtitles: Revaluing Screen Translation. 
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Iwabuchi, Koichi. 2002. 
Recentering Globlization: Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism. 
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Johnson, Derek (ed.). 2018. From networks to Netflix: a guide to 
changing channels. New York: Routledge.
Lobato, Ramon. 2019. Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital 
Distribution. New York: New York University Press.
Netflix. 2017. “Netflix is Looking for the Best Translators Around the 
Globe”, 
https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/netflix-is-looking-for-the-best-translators-around-the-globe 
(accessed 18 April 2020).
Nye, Joseph S. Jr. 2004. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World 
Politics. New York: Public Affairs.
Pallister, Kathryn (ed.). 2019. Netflix Nostalgia: Streaming the Past on 
Demand. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Pedersen, Jan. 2018. “From old tricks to Netflix: how local are 
interlingual subtitling norms for streamed television?” Journal of 
Audiovisual Translation 1(1), 81-100. 
http://www.jatjournal.org/index.php/jat/article/view/46/5
Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: 
Multiculturalism and the Media. London: Routledge.
Smith, Michael D. and Rahul Telang. 2016. Streaming, Stealing, Sharing: 
Big data and the future of entertainment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Timeline
Submission of abstracts (400-500 words):			1 February 2021
Acceptance of abstracts:					1 March 2021
Submission of full manuscripts:				1 September 2021
Decisions to authors:						1 February 2022
Revised manuscripts due:					1 August 2022
Final version of papers to journal from guest editors:	1 October 2022
Publication of special issue:					Summer 2023

Guest editor bios:

Jinsil Choi is Assistant Professor, Keimyung University, South Korea. 
Her research interests include corpus-based translation, pre-modern 
Korea in translation, and subtitles and film ratings in Korea. She is 
now working on a monograph, entitled Government Translation in South 
Korea: A Corpus Based Study, to be published by Routledge in 2020.

Kyung Hye Kim is Lecturer in Translation Studies at the School of 
Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and an Honorary 
Associate Director of the Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural 
Studies at Shanghai International Studies University, China. Her 
academic interests lie in corpus-based translation studies, 
retranslation, and critical discourse analysis.

Jonathan Evans is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the 
University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. He is the author of The Many Voices 
of Lydia Davis (2016) and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of 
Translation and Politics (2018). His academic interests lie in the 
circulation of media and non-hegemonic ideas.

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