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This article explores the emergence of transformative subtitling practices in the digital culture, a context of production shaped by the dialectical relation between technological advances and cultural change. Drawing on a qualitative discussion of fansubbing practices, the article contends that transformative subtitling signals a clear move towards a regime of co-creation between producers and users of media content, fostering mutual recognition between these increasingly blurred camps. The second part of the article delivers an analytical discussion of examples of authorial titling in mainstream British drama to demonstrate the penetration of transformative subtitling in commercial media products that also posit spectatorial subjectivity. The article concludes by reflecting on the parataxic reading practices that these new subtitling practices encourage and the fluid nature of the transnational collectivities it caters for.

Media sociologists and cultural globalization theorists have tended to overlook the contribution of translators to the circulation of media content in the era of digital culture. After critiquing the reasons for the invisibility of translation in the literature on global cultural transactions, this article moves on to examine the emergence of new amateur subtitling collectivities in today’s informational society, exploring the role that non-professional translators – specifically, networks of activist subtitlers – play within the participatory media industries. Using examples from a case study of Ansarclub, a Spanish group of engaged amateur translators, this article gauges the extent to which their participation, remediation and bricolage practices – the main components of digital culture (Deuze [2006] Participation, remediation, bricolage: considering principal components of a digital culture. The Information Society 22: 63–75) – fit in or divert from the cocreational dynamics underpinning other domains of the media marketplace. It is argued that the interventionist and ‘monitorial’ quality of activist subtitling lies at the heart of an emerging paradigm of civic engagement, with fluid transnational communities of interest acting as the building blocks of participatory translation.

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