Chapter 7

Fansubs and AVT norms

Subtitling conventions are not set in stone and only time will
tell whether these fansub conventions are just a mere fleeting fashion
or whether they will […] become the seed of a new type
of subtitling for the digital era.
(Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez 2006: 51)
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7.1 Introduction

Audiovisual Translation (AT) represents an area in which professional norms and

practices have been challenged the most by the freedom and empowerment of
users, primarily the “fan-produced, translated, subtitled version” of audiovisual
products known as fansubbing (Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez 2006: 37). This set
of practices emerged from an initial discontent of fans with existing professional
and industry approaches, embodying how fans conceptualize the creation and
reception of subtitled products in opposition to mainstream professional practices.
As one of the most productive area in TS research on collaborative and volunteer
translation, studies have shown that fans working without the influence of profes-
sional conventions, as well as market and regulatory forces, are often emboldened
to defy established norms and standards, taking into their hands the creation of
subtitles that satisfy their own needs (ibid). The interest in the analysis of this phe-
nomenon lies beyond the benefits of descriptive analyses or empirical research in
TS. It also lays in the fact that volunteer subtitling has actually had an impact on
the evolution of professional norms and practices (Massidda 2015; Katan 2015), a
reverse process in which non-professionals can potentially impact and gradually
change the professional world. The goal of this chapter is therefore to analyze
how research into fansubbing has provided a new perspective on the emergence,
consolidation and evolution of translation norms. It examines how professional
norms have been challenged by the freedom and creative drive of fansubbers, sub-
sequently providing new insights into the notion of norms in the discipline and
the consequences and dynamics of “norm flouting” and norm evolution.
 180 Crowdsourcing and online collaborative translations

7.2 From professional norms to “abusive subtitling” … and back

Already in the early days of fansubbing research, Asian and Media Studies scholar
Nornes (1999, 2007) introduced the notion of “abusive subtitling”, a notion taken
up by audiovisual TS scholars and referred to by Pérez-González (2012) as “trans-
formative subtitling”. Abusive subtitling was defined as a type of subtitling that
primed experimentation, freedom and instincts rather than “the inertia of con-
vention” (Nornes 1999: 18). According to Nornes, this practice emerged from the
propensity to play with formatting, graphics, location of subtitles or explicitation
of cultural items in glosses that could potentially fill a screen. It also arose as a re-
action to professional practices that he described as “corrupt”, since they “[smooth]
over its textual violence and [domesticate] all otherness while [they pretend] to
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bring the audience to an experience of the foreign” (ibid). Mainstream subtitling

practices were conceptualized as a mechanism that corrupts the source text, elimi-
nating important aspects in order to conform “the foreign to the framework of the
target language and cultural norms” (Nornes 2007: 178). The abusive subtitler, in a
reaction against traditional norm-guided practices, “pretends to locate his or her
subtitles in the place of the other […] abusive subtitles always directs the spectator
back to the original foreign text” (ibid: 32). This notion brought to the surface the
potential interventionist force of fansubbing communities to ignore or remodel
professional subtitling norms as they please (Pérez-González 2012). They brought
back the pendulum from an excessive domesticating approach in professional
settings to a more literal target-oriented one, displaying more foreignized subtitles
that bring the audience closer to the source text and culture.
The reasons that drove fans to challenge and reshape audiovisual norms lay
in several factors. The professional subtitling norms and conventions for wide
consumption in receiving communities were perceived as “outmoded, inadequate
and above all excessively ‘target-oriented’” (Massidda 2015: 11). This target-ori-
ented, naturalizing and domesticating approach was often brought up as a source
of discontent. Professional subtitling was blamed for eliminating and adapting
culture-specific items of source texts, a common practice that allegedly upset
fans with intimate knowledge of the source culture of the audiovisual product
(Innoccenti and Maestri 2010). This target-orientedness was criticized for distort-
ing important issues related to:
signification, idioms, register and style, and also for impoverishing the sense of
otherness inherent in the foreign dialogue in the name of fluency, readability and
the questionable notion of transparency. (Massidda 2015: 11)

As a consequence, fans perceived that professionally subtitled products displayed

an excessive adaptation of culture, humor or style, eliminating the flavor and feel
 Chapter 7. Fansubs and AVT norms 181

of the original sociocultural context. In other cases, it is not the translation but
the power of regulatory agencies and audiovisual boards which impacted existing
norms, such normalization or standardization of foul language or cursing (Ameri
and Ghazizadeh 2015). The emergence of participatory cultures helped raise the
voice of fans who started to criticize the professional subtitling of their favorite TV
series and films, expressing “disagreement with commercial subtitling practices
and [imposing] linguistic and cultural mediation strategies of their own” (Pérez-
González 2007: 4). In this context, fans and volunteers took into their hands the
development of new practices that suited their expectations, empowered by the
freedom provided by working outside professional and market pressures. They
started to cater to fans as a distinct active audience from the mainstream, a view-
ership segment with a deeper knowledge of the source language and culture.
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After over two decades of a creative surge in fansubbing in Japanese anime,

the so-called “post-fansub” era emerged around other audiovisual genres, such
as TV series and films around the world. US TV series are fansubbed around the
world, while in other cases other trends have emerged, such as, among others,
Korean TV dramas in Thailand or the Philippines (i.e. Rossum 2015). In the sec-
ond decade of the 20th century, some established fansub communities started to
move away from the experimental nature of early anime practices and shifted to
replicate professional approaches in their organizations and workflows (Barra and
Guarnaccia 2008: 2; Orrego-Carmona 2013: 14; Massidda 2015: 41; Rong 2015: 20).
The pendulum started to swing back in some genres and attempting to produce
products as close as possible to professional ones became an aspirational value in
these communities. A new type of fansubber emerged: individuals that pursue
certain activities as an amateur but attempt to closely follow professional practic-
es. Orrego-Carmona (2013) refers to these individuals as “pro-am’s” borrowing
the notion of Leadbeater and Miller (2004). This attempt to replicate professional
practices entails that amateur processes tend to “resemble a job more than a hobby”
(Massidda 2015: 41). Witness to this is the fact that almost all nightly TV series
in the USA are subtitled within 8 hours in Chinese by highly structured fansub
communities (Wu 2010). Only through carefully crafted structures and workflows,
the power of the crowd and near professional organization and work ethics, can
this be achieved.
These fansubs communities have not only started to replicate professional
workflows and structures, they have also started to comply to the highest possible
degree with professional subtitling norms. Orrego-Carmona (2012), for example,
identified that out of 26 main professional norms, the subtitling group ArgenTeam
in Argentina includes 19 of them. This represents a point of departure from the
total freedom of initial anime fansubbers to a desire to comply as much as possible
with professional practices in certain groups. Some new norms and standards
 182 Crowdsourcing and online collaborative translations

started to emerge, with some communities abiding by strict codes and standards
of practice. The new, more diversified fansub era had started, and it will only get
bigger from there.

7.3 Translation and subtitling norms in fansubbing research

The study of norms in fansubbing has been primarily framed within the system
approach to the study of translation norms of Toury (1995) and Chesterman (1997).
It has also been built upon the corpus of AVT studies focused on audiovisual
norms from both descriptive (i.e. Días Cintas 2003; Díaz Cintas and Remael 2007)
and empirical perspectives (i.e. Karamitroglou 2000; Pedersen 2011). From a broad
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TS perspective, norms have been defined as general values or ideas that are shared
by specific communities or groups as to what is right or wrong, adequate or in-
adequate, and their transfer into performance instructions that can be applied to
specific situations (Hermans 2013b). They have also been defined as “regularities of
translation behavior within a specific sociocultural context” (Schäffner 2010: 237).
Norms specify what is tolerated, prescribed and permitted (Toury 1998). They also
indicate what kind of consequences can exist for deviant behaviors, such as the po-
tential to discard the translation, assume the non-professional status of the trans-
lator with its implications, refuse to accept the translation product, etc. According
to Chesterman, translators that do not comply with norms “threaten normality,
produce difference and are quickly ostracized or punished” (Chesterman 1997: 54).
Since they hold a social dimension, they are relatively stable and they hold a relative
durability despite differences between individual translators’ styles and critical
responses to them (Hermans 2013b).
AVT studies normally depart from the classification of norms by Toury (1995)
and/or Chesterman (1997). The seminal work of Toury (1995) proposed three sets
of norms that guide the translation process: initial, preliminary and operational
norms. “Initial norms” deal with the choice a translator has to make in order to
operate within the norms of the source text or the target text. They guide the trans-
lator towards a more domesticated or foreignized approach, bringing the reader
more towards the source text and culture or the target one. “Preliminary norms”
relate to what type of text should be translated in terms of genres, authors, periods,
etc. Meanwhile, “operational norms” affect the actual process of translation. They
are subdivided between “matricial norms”, norms that account for the macrostruc-
ture of the text and to what extent the structure of the source text should be ob-
served, as well as “textual norms” related to the stylistic and textual decisions at the
microtextual level. Toury identified the potential for creative uses and deviations
from the norms when placing them in a continuum of “socio-cultural constraints”
 Chapter 7. Fansubs and AVT norms 183

between the personal “idiosyncrasies” of single translators and “absolute rules”. In

the case of fansubbing, the “idiosyncrasies” could also be approached in term of
“collective idiosyncrasies”, since many studies have also identified recurrent differ-
ences between the procedures and released products from different communities
within and between countries (see 7.4).
Studies into non-professional subtitling norms have often also incorporated
Chesterman’s proposal (1997: 175–187). While Toury was more concerned with
translators’ decision making, the work of the former introduced the interaction
between translators, receivers and other translators in the study of norms. This in-
troduction of the end-users represents one of the main reasons why Chesterman’s
proposal provides a good framework for the study of fansubbing. He distinguished
between two types of norms: “expectancy norms” and “professional norms”.
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Professional norms account for what a community or group expects a translation

to be like, and therefore, delimit what a community might accept as a proper or
legitimate translation. They “regulate the translation process itself” (1997: 68) and
they shape translation products. Professional norms were subdivided between
“accountability”, “communication” and “relation” norms. “Accountability norms”
relate to ethical issues and govern the relation between the translator and the oth-
er parties in the translation process, such as clients, authors, the readership, etc.
“Communication norms” relate to the necessity of behaving in a way “to optimize
communication” (1997: 69) during the translation process. The most important of
the professional norms, the “relation norm”, focuses on the relation between the ST
and the TT, where “the translator should act in such a way that an appropriate re-
lation of relevant similarity is established and maintained between the source text
and the target text” (ibid 69). What constitutes “relevant similarity” and what type
is appropriate and how this can be achieved depends on many factors, including
translation traditions, the client’s brief, the type of text to translate or the expec-
tations of the audience. The relation norm can help disentangle translations from
adaptations or transcreations. For example, this relation norm can be used in the
study of fansubs to separate legitimate fansubs from other derivative subtitling or
dubbing practices by amateurs such as “fake translation” (Izwaini 2014), “fundub-
bing” (Nord et al. 2015) or “parodic dubbing” (Nornes 2007: 195), the subtitling or
dubbing of a video with a fabricated target text for fun often using local references,
accents or slang. The last norms embody the role of the audience and they are
referred to as “expectancy norms”. They are “established by reader’s [and client’s]
expectations on a translation” (Chesterman 1997: 68) and concern “what a trans-
lation (of this type) should be like” (Chesterman 1997: 64). “Expectancy norms”
are of a higher order than professional norms, since the former give shape to the
expectations that professionals attempt to conform with to create an acceptable TT.
 184 Crowdsourcing and online collaborative translations

In terms of research into fansubbing, Chesterman’s proposal rightly highlights

this role of the reader and the possible expectations. Some researchers, such as
Pedersen (2011) have highlighted that expectancy norms “focus on the reader, and
the reader is in focus in subtitling, due to the transient nature of the medium and
because of its constraints” (2011: 36–37). Thus, norms are understood as linked
between individual or collective translation behaviors with collective expectations
(Hermans 2013b: 80). Chesterman’s proposal has thus been relevant in the study
of fansubbing cultures, since the “prosumers” or the fans themselves are the ones
adapting and experimenting with the way they would like to receive these subtitles.
In the age of “prosumers” (Toffler 1980), expectancy norms can be shaped by the
same agents that produce translations working outside the constraints imposed by
“professional norms”. The translation process is carried out by the same individual
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or collective that both produces the translation and that shapes and establishes
norms, a phenomenon that deserves further study. Expectancy norms are also
related to notions of “correctness” of a translation, shaped by the ideas in any
specific community about what kinds of translations will be recognized as proper,
correct or acceptable (Hermans 2013b).
Chesterman’s emphasis on the reader and the target orientedness of the norms
closely relates his proposal to that of functionalist Christiane Nord (1991). She
suggested two types of norms, “constitutive” and “regulatory” ones. The latter
account for the professional norms and regulatory norms would guide the process
itself. Nord also delved into the differences between norms and conventions in
TS. The notion of convention has been defined from a philosophical perspective
as regularities in human behavior in situations of cooperation (Lewis 1969). From
functionalist approaches in TS, this notion has been defined as:
Implicit or tacit non-binding regulation of behavior, based on common knowl-
edge and the expectations of what others expect you to expect from them (etc.)
to do in a certain situation. (Nord 1991: 96)

From this definition it should be stressed that conventions are non-binding, an

aspect that distances this notion from norms. Breaking a convention does not
imply any potential penalty or consequence beyond the possible impact on the
ease of communication; that is, flouting a convention can be seen as a creative or
strange strategy and does not lead to any penalty.
 Chapter 7. Fansubs and AVT norms 185

7.4 Fansubbing or how collaboration can challenge translation norms

A significant aspect that fansubbing brings to the surface is the potential of norms
to be challenged, to adapt, or to evolve throughout time. Norms in general are not
conceived as static and fossilized, but quite the opposite. They can change “because
they need to be constantly readjusted so as to meet changing appropriateness con-
ditions” (Hermans 1999:84). These changes are due to the fact that the nature of
norms involves “conflicts, challenges and changes over time” (Hermans 2013b: 80),
and these collective practices prove to be a case in point. In the case of fansub-
bing, the potential conflict appears between professional subtitling norms and the
expectations and preferences of certain audiences empowered by technological
advances. These active collectives can define the “appropriateness” or “correctness”
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of a translation outside market pressures, from the style used to the placement
of subtitles. In this process, fansubs bring to the surface that professional and
non-professional versions are often directed at different audiences (Wilcock 2013).
While professional ones are addressed to the mainstream audience, fansubs are
directed at audiences with a more comprehensive knowledge of the source culture
that the “average viewer”. This “average viewer” requires a specific set of established
norms to facilitate the enjoyment of the audiovisual product, while fans crave a
richer approach to culture and language transfer. An interesting process emerges
in the “user-generated translation” paradigm: the merging of the audience from
whom “expectancy norms” emerge and the translators that operates under them.
Thus, the “expectancy norms” reshape and help establish “operational norms” that
subsequently guide the translation process in fan communities. If, as Hermans
indicated (2013b), the study of norms can help gain insights into concepts of trans-
lation held by particular communities at certain periods, the existing studies of
how fansubs deal with professional norms and the study of the actual impact
of non-professional norms in reshaping actual professional practices (Massidda
2015; Katan 2015), can contribute to expanding the notion of translation and AVT
translation in the way (Gambier 2014).
Another significant issue is fact that norms require validation and enforcement
by a “norm authority” (Chesterman 1997: 66). This authority handles cases of norm
deviation, since in the professional context: “[n]orm flouters threaten normality,
produce difference and are quickly ostracized or punished” (Chesterman 1997: 54).
This authority becomes a more flexible and fluid notion across different fansubbing
initiatives and settings. Since the early days of anime fansubbing, communities
with different degrees of authority levels and hierarchy have emerged, from high-
ly structured workflows, hierarches and established norms or conventions (Bold
2011; Orrego-Carmona 2012) to completely free and experimental cases that dif-
fer across initiatives and national boundaries. For example, volunteer subtitling
 186 Crowdsourcing and online collaborative translations

communities, such as TED, have highly structured guidelines that resemble pro-
fessional ones. Participants are categorized according to their status, from general
translators to reviewers/managers. In some cases, subtitling guidelines for non-an-
ime communities can include the majority of professional standards, such as the
case of the volunteer community ArgenTeam 1 (Orrego-Carmona 2012). Similarly,
the great majority of Chinese fansubs possess a highly rigid structure that enforces
certain norms. Thus, the emergence of different norms in non-professional subti-
tling communities does not necessarily entail the absence of norm authority. This
authority is implicitly present in non-professional participation guides and codes
of ethics where non-compliance to common self-established norms often leads to
dismissal from the amateur community (Drugan 2011).
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7.4.1 Challenges to professional audiovisual norms from fansubbing

Fansubbing in part emerges as a form of expression of disagreement with profes-

sional subtitling practices and therefore, as previously described, communities
consciously attempt to develop their own linguistic and cultural mediation strat-
egies (Pérez-González 2007:7). In general, collaborative audiovisual translation
has been the main ground for a systematic, conscious and willful violation of
professional translation norms, something that has not happened necessarily in
other realms in which volunteers participate. This process treads the fine line
between the flexibility inherent in norms and the conscious violation when some
constraints are not accepted by fans. This flexibility is present in theorizations of
norms in TS. For Hermans (2013b), not all norms have the same force, and not all
norms imply necessarily that experimentation might be curtailed:
[n]orms may be strong or weak, more or less durable, and narrow or broad in
scope. They can and will be breached, but they are able to cope with a relatively
large amount of discrepant behavior. (2013b: 3)

This discrepant behavior in fansubbing started to jump into commercial versions

of programs in the beginning of the 20th century (Díaz Cintas 2005). The adoption
of glosses and information on the screen is nowadays common in some audiovisual
TV genres, such as MTV programs or the recent incorporation of intralingual
titles with information in series such as Sherlock. Current research (McClarty
2012; Fox 2015; Katan 2015) as well as TV stations, such as the BBC, are also
exploring subtitle placement in different locations on the screen. Research is also

1. According to Orrego-Carmona (2012) the ArgenTeam subtitling group guidelines in 2011

include 19 of the 26 standards of subtitling in professional codes.
 Chapter 7. Fansubs and AVT norms 187

currently exploring the reception of norm-breaking creative subtitling (Caffrey

2009; Orrego-Carmona 2015), since norm deviation can potentially cause different
effects in term of comprehension, cognitive load, etc.
Another area in which fansubbing has been argued to impact professional
practices is the shortening of the time gap between the original release and the
release of the subtitled version. This effect has been perceived in many cases of
the official release of many highly popular US TV series and the time they are
released in other audiovisual markets. Massidda (2015) presents the last episode
of Lost in 2010 as a case in point. The original version of the episode was aired
in several countries at the same time. Within hours the subtitling communities
ItaSA and Subsfactory released their fansubbed versions, while the professional
subtitled version was released 24 hours later. According to Massidda, “never before
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had Italians experienced such a speed in dealing with audiovisual translation”

(2015: 39). Similarly, Orrego-Carmona (2014a) introduces the case of the fourth
season of Games of Thrones that was released with subtitles in Spain 18 hours after
it was broadcasted in the USA. He also concludes the non-professional subtitling
has “influenced changes in media flows” (ibid: 67). These changes in the temporal
dimension of translation production and distribution can also be seen in other
initiatives such as the PBS TV station crowdsourcing of US presidential speeches
to reach as many locales as possible.
As a whole, fansubbing also challenges the established mantra that the
AVT process is defined as “a loss with very little intervention by the translator”
(Gambier 2013: 54). Subtitlers normally attempt to make their work as transparent
and unobtrusive as possible (Pedersen 2011: 22). The visibility of fansubbers is often
enhanced through the inclusion of the name of the collective or individual re-
sponsible for the translation, both for fansubbing communities (Orrego-Carmona
2012) or crowdsourcing ones like TED (Olohan 2014). The interventionist role of
the fansubber can emerge as a transformative figure (Pérez-González 2007; 2014),
challenging the invisibility of the translator through conscious interventions such
as glosses with cultural or linguistic explanations.
This distinct nature of non-professional subtitling has attracted the attention
of an increasing number of researchers, mainly focused on a popular trend of
empirical studies that contrast audiovisual norms between the two polarities of
practice, fansub and professional, in different countries (i.e., Pérez-González 2007;
Feitosa 2009; Verbruggen 2010; García-Manchón 2013; Miloševski 2013; Wilcock
2013; Wang 2014; Ameri and Ghazizadeh 2015; Massidda 2015; Okyayuz 2016),
including parallel corpus studies of non-professional translations that include STs
and TTs (Bogucki 2009; Sajna 2013; Khalaf, Rashid, Jumingan and Othman 2015).
Researchers have tackled the study of non-compliance with professional norms, an
issue that has been pointed out as a necessity in the field. For example, Schäffner
 188 Crowdsourcing and online collaborative translations

(2010) precisely pointed out that the study of norms in TS has often ignored the
issue of non-compliance with dominant norms. She identifies deviations, excep-
tions and creative uses in translator strategies as potential indications of the role of
the translator as an active agent (Baker 2006; Pérez-González 2007), modeling the
translation to match their activist or interventionist role. In this sense, early anime
fansubs have helped pave the way for creative and experimental subtitling practices
in other domains, such as activist subtitling (Baker 2015, 2016). Fansubbing rep-
resents an ideal locus for the study of the conflict between professional norms and
practices of fansubbers that currently either attempt to operate within the scope
of professional norms or those communities that consciously decide, in a merging
of expectancy and operational norms in the same collective, to experiment with
these norms. They also represent a great locus to study the effect of compliance or
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deviancy from norms on the reception of the audiovisual texts (i.e., Caffrey 2009;
Orrego-Carmona 2015). The following section reviews the different challenges
that fansubs have posed to professional norms and practices through a summary
of published results in relevant literature.

7.5 Challenges to subtitling norms: A summary

This section offers an overview of the most common deviations from professional
norms identified in fansubbing in a series of published descriptive and empirical
studies (Ferrer-Simó 2005; Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez 2006; Pérez-González
2006, 2007; Gambier 2013; Wilcock 2013; Massidda 2015). It is important to bear
in mind that not all types of fansubbing incorporate all of these practices. In broad
terms, scholars differentiate between the experimentation of early anime fansub-
bing and more recent practices attempting to replicate professional standards
based on North American films or TV series (Pérez-González 2014). Therefore,
different communities of practice across geographic areas might not equally share
all characteristics. The main features discussed are:
1. The literal source-oriented approach
2. More creative and individual renditions of source texts
3. Subtitle positioning, layout and font
4. Number of lines per subtitle
5. The addition of glosses and notes
6. The addition of discussion bands to add comments
7. The role of omission and addition
8. Different approaches to taboos and improper language
9. Different quality standards
 Chapter 7. Fansubs and AVT norms 189

First of all, fansubs are characterized by a more literal source-oriented approach.

This is one of the most common features identified in fansubbing (Díaz Cintas
and Muñoz Sánchez 2006; Orrego-Carmona 2015; Massidda 2015). Fansubbers
tend to highlight the foreignness of the source text and they dismiss the more
domesticating approach, both linguistic and cultural, that professional subtitling
embraces. Fansubs are often “closer to the original, wordier, more word-for-word,
making the reading time shorter” (Gambier 2013: 54). This also entails that fansubs
preserve linguistic idiosyncrasies of the original in the target text. As a result,
fansub viewers normally accept to a higher degree foreignized translations with
literal language often heavily marked by interference form the source text. In a
comparative study of French fansubs with professional ones, Wilcock (2013) iden-
tified clear differences in the strategies used in both cases. Fansubbers preferred a
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more complete rendering of the source text dialogue and a more source-oriented
approach, which retains elements of spoken language found in the film dialogue.
This meant the inclusion of discourse markers and marks of orality that are nor-
mally the linguistic first elements to be eliminated in order to condense the oral
text into subtitles (Díaz Cintas 2003). A study by Tang (2014) focused on a con-
trastive study of cultural representations in the movie Kung Fu Panda in dubbing
and subtitling by professional and non professionals. Results showed that both
versions showed a marked preference for interventionist strategies such as adapta-
tion, rephrasing and replacement. The study concludes both practices highlight the
active role of the translation in the shaping of cultural representation. More recent
studies have identified an impact from the tendency in structured communities to
replicate professional norms and standards. For example, in the study by Matielo
and Spindola (2011) comparing professional and non professional subtitles of the
US series Heroes, the study was inconclusive as to whether both versions would
diverge in terms of foreignizing and domesticating cultural items. It was found
that both versions showed a similar tendency to foreignize some items. Differences
were nevertheless present in some categories of analysis, such as the translation of
anthroponyms and forms of entertainment.
The freedom of volunteers can lead to more creative and individual renditions
of the source text (Gambier 2014). This contrasts with the ideal of a more literal
and source-oriented approach seen in many fansub communities. One extreme
case in this area is the above-mentioned case of “fundubbing” or “funsubtitling”
(Nord et al. 2015; Chaume 2013). These cases are characterized by the “the witty
and humorous nature of this type of home-grown dubbing” (Chaume, 2013: 111).
A cline can be observed, therefore, in this area between the more literal approach
on the one side, all the way to the extreme case of “fundubbing” or “fake subti-
tling”. Some studies have explored the role of creativity in the subtitling of hu-
mor (Verbruggen 2010; Wu 2013; Okyayuz 2016). In a MA thesis study of Dutch
 190 Crowdsourcing and online collaborative translations

professional and non-professional subtitles (Verbruggen 2010), it was reported that

professional subtitling of movies such as Faulty Towers, Shrek or Monty Python
contained more humorous puns translated as pun (55%) than those in non-pro-
fessional versions (32%). Thus, creative solutions and the constraints in subtitles
can also lead to difficulties in identifying creative solutions in some cases. For
example, it is common for Chinese communities to include puns and jokes with
references to the target Chinese culture, replacing US cultural references with
Chinese ones (Wu 2013), while this is not the case in many other geographic ar-
eas. Creative spelling that appears in subtitles has also been the object of research
(Secara 2011), since spelling mimicking text messaging has emerged as a novel tool
for creativity in audiovisual texts. The results of a pilot study by Secara confirmed
that creative “spellings do not hinder the viewing process as a whole” and they
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facilitate the viewing since it allows “viewers to spend more time fixating outside
the subtitled area” (ibid: 168). Creativity also extends not only to spelling, but also
to how subtitles are displayed.
The experimentation and creativity in fansubs is mainly reflected in the posi-
tioning, layout and font of subtitles. Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez (2006) indi-
cate that subtitles have been generally very standardized in terms of positioning,
while fansubs playfully approach how to display them in certain cases. Fansubs
challenge the fixed positions of subtitle lines on the bottom, or the top when text
or the attention is directed at the bottom of the screen (Díaz Cintas and Muñoz
Sánchez 2006 Cintas 2003). Subtitles can appear anywhere on the screen; they
emerge in the form of speech or thought bubbles. They can appear and fly from
the sides or from different angles (Fox 2015). Font can be used in order to indicate
the foreignness of the speech or differences in the speech delivery, “blending in
with the aesthetics of visual semiotics” (Pérez-González 2014: 54). Subtitles can
also change in color in order to indicate, for example, alternation of talk. Fansubs
also sacrifice the maximum or optimal visibility to aesthetic considerations.
Professional norms indicate a maximum of two subtitle lines per segment
(Díaz Cintas 2003). Due to the literal approach and the tendency to explicitate
cultural items, fansubs can incorporate up to three full lines of subtitles. They often
flout the limit of characters per line (Gambier 2013; Massidda 2015). This general
tendency is not always the case. For example, Feitosa (2009) studied a corpus of
excerpts of professional and non-professional subtitles in ten movies commercial-
ized in Brazil in 2000. The results found no differences in the duration of subtitles
or the amount of subtitle lines.
The desire to include more cultural and linguistic information leads to the
potential incorporation of glosses and notes. These glosses can appear as pop ups
inside the subtitles. Explanatory notes are usually placed at the top of the screen
(Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez 2006) and normally appear and disappear with
 Chapter 7. Fansubs and AVT norms 191

the subtitles that they accompany. They can also appear in different locations of
the screen if any visual item needs to be explicitated. This practice challenges the
invisibility of the translator, purposefully breaking the “suspension of disbelief”
that subtitles are supposed to help create in order to enjoy the audiovisual product.
The overload of potential information can add difficulty to the task of reading
subtitles. In the eye tracking study by Caffrey (2009), it was shown that a signif-
icant correlation between the appearance of these glosses and cognitive effort in
the reception exists. It was also shown that more subtitles lines were ignored if
compared to subtitles without glosses. Less time was also spent on the bottom of
the screen when glosses were displayed. This reception study clearly correlates the
desire of fansubbers to add to the viewing experience with the enjoyment of the
audiovisual text on the other. It also signals, as previously mentioned, the differ-
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ent audience expectations and the emergence of different subtitles for different
audiences (Wilcock 2013).
In addition to glosses, some volunteer subtitling sites have incorporated dis-
cussion bands where fans and audiences can potentially add comments. For ex-
ample, in the case as the case of the Korean drama fansub website Viki (Dwyer
2013) a comment band can appear on the top of the screen were viewers and
fansubbers can add information. This represents a case of user intervention in
the filmic text that is not accomplished by means of manipulating the subtitles
themselves. Rather, these comment bands represent a mechanism for emotional
community building. In fact, the comments themselves in Viki are usually unre-
lated to the subtitles themselves, such as gossip or viewer reactions (ibid). These
mechanisms open up the participatory process to the audience at large of these
subtitles, resulting in “a more open if chaotic model of participation” (ibid: 220).
Omission and condensation represents one of the cornerstones of professional
subtitling practices due to the limitations of the number of characters displayed on
screen at a time and in specific time constraints to facilitate comfortable reading
(Díaz Cintas 2003). The reduction can normally entail up to 40–44% of reduction
in the subtitled version (ibid). In order to achieve this reduction, redundant lan-
guage, markers or orality tend to be eliminated. Since fansubbers defend a return
to a literal source-oriented approach, they show a tendency to convey everything
in the original dialogue, even when the result might be too much text on screen.
According to Massidda (2015: 59):
[s]ubbers aim to convey “everything” belonging to the original dialogues, deem-
ing it of paramount importance to detach themselves from the mainstream prac-
tices of “domestication” and the excessive conciseness of professional subtitling.

These practices have been examined in a number of contrastive studies between

professionals and non-professionals. One of the major contributions to the body
 192 Crowdsourcing and online collaborative translations

of knowledge of fansubbing is the potential to pay attention to that which pro-

fessionals discard (Massidda 2015: 59). These omissions are often framed in what
Nornes (2007) referred to as “corrupt translation”, and these textual and graphic
violations could be an interesting area of research in TS. The previously mentioned
study of Feitosa (2009) focuses on a contrastive corpus study on explicitation in
professional and non-professional subtitles in Brazil, and even when explicitation
was found in both textual populations, non-professional subtitles tended to be
longer and more explicit. This indicates the recurring tendency in non-profession-
al subtitles to render all the materials without omissions and including a higher
degree of explicitation. 2 The dissertation by Bruti (2015) focused on contrastive
analysis of the translation of compliments in the subtitles of the TV series Lost,
one of the discursive features which are guidelines often recommend reducing or
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eliminating in case of constraints. The results showed that contrary to the expec-
tations of the researcher, compliments were almost always translated, and with
no differences in the strategy adopted by professionals or amateurs. In another
study, discursive markers and register were studied in the translation of Korean
honorifics in subtitles (Rossum 2015), a specific issue in Korean culture. Generally,
fansubs of several Korean dramas, such as Coffee Prince and Reply, included a
more foreignized approach which included more foreignizations and the different
honorifics as compared to the professional versions. Nevertheless, differences were
identified between the translations of two different series, pointing to significant
variation between subtitling collectives in terms of their approach to subtitling
cultural items.
Subtitles tend to show a standardized and normalized language (Díaz Cintas
2003). One of the main targets of this tendency is taboos and improper language.
Studies, for example, have identified that non-professional subtitling can be more
direct in the case of cursing and swearing. It is common to identify that official
dubbed and subtitled versions tend to be neutralized and tend to avoid sexual and
foul language (Massidda 2015). Two different studies of professional and non-pro-
fessional subtitles and/or dubbed versions in Iran (Ameri and Ghazizadeh 2015)
and Spain (García-Manchón 2013) showed that fansub versions tend to have a
much more direct translation of the original swearing language with stronger
discursive force. This tendency conforms to the more literal and direct approach
to subtitling in fansub communities.
One of the early goals of contrastive studies was quality standards. Generally,
and not surprisingly, several studies have analyzed the lower quality of

2. The presence of explicitation as a general feature of translation in professional subtitles was

identified in the study of Perego (2008).
 Chapter 7. Fansubs and AVT norms 193

non-professional subtitles in comparison with professional ones or from a pro-

fessional perspective (i.e. Bogucki 2009; Khalaf, Rashid, Jumingan and Othman
2015). As was seen in Chapter 5, working without the boundaries of professional
translation also means that quality norms and standards in professional settings
might not apply, priming speed and accessibility to compliance with industry
quality standards. Nevertheless, with the evolution of subtitling communities,
some studies have found that in certain cases professional versions can have more
inadequate renderings than the non-professional ones (Massidda 2015).
This review has not only highlighted the diverging nature of fansubbing, but it
has also shown the diverse nature of fansubbing practices across genres, initiatives
and geographical areas. This makes an overall description of fansubbing difficult.
This challenging task has been attempted by Massidda (2015), who proposed a
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“hybrid proposal” for fansubbing norms. The researcher indicates that post-anime
fansubbing norms tend to include “minor modifications” to the professional ones.
In general, the overall goal of fansubbing processes is to allow viewers to enjoy the
audiovisual product in a literal and source-oriented approach, paying attention
to the distinct audience to which the text is addressed. It includes the above-men-
tioned characteristics of the general literal approach and the more direct approach
to cursing and taboo language. The layout proposal includes two lines in white
with 45 characters, while omission is limited only by the spatio-temporal con-
straints. It is of interest that the foreignizing approach can be achieved through
“loanwords (cultural-bound expressions explicitated by notes, for example)” and
neologisms “(derived from youth culture slang) in order for obscure foreign con-
cepts to enter the target culture” (Massidda 2015: 63). Finally, it offers the same
guidelines for punctuation and segmentation as professional codes. This set of
norms seems to fit within post-anime film and TV subtitling, but nevertheless
the different contexts and audiovisual genres in which fansubbing occurs requires
a more open and flexible approach. Rather than a normative approach that goes
contrary to the free and open nature of fansubs, the proposal by Massidda (2015)
would be best described as a descriptive apparatus to conceptualize existing TV
fansubbing in Western contexts.
This chapter has mainly focused on norms, one of the most significant and
exciting challenges that fansubbing poses. Other issues of relevance to TS that have
been explored in the literature, such as interventionist or ideological issues (i.e.
Pérez-González 2007, 2014), do deserve further study that has not been possible
in this project which is focused on how online collaborative translations can help
expand the limits of translation. There are still a lot of areas to explore and fansub-
bing will continue to provide ample areas of inquiry, witness to the high interest
fansubbing attracts among young and seasoned scholars alike. Fansubbing flows
 194 Crowdsourcing and online collaborative translations

are only going to increase in the future, parallel to the ever-increasing penetration
of the Internet around the world. The creative force of fans will continue to evolve
and run across geographical areas and initiatives, both parallel and contrary to
professional practices.
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