Exploring the Social Construction of Digital Personae of Content Creators on Video-Streaming Platforms

While scholars from various disciplines have begun to focus on the concept of ‘persona’ in digital spaces (e.g. Marshall et al. 2020), the role of translation in persona construction has received little attention. Meanwhile, scholars in translation studies have employed persona analysis to explore the representation of translators in literary and audiovisual translation (e.g. Sela-Sheffy 2008; Ranzato 2019). The cross-cultural construction of digital personae involves a range of human-to-human and human-to-technology interactions. This paper explores the social construction of digital personae on participatory video platforms Bilibili and YouTube. Bilibili is the world's largest participatory video platform, and its unique ‘danmu’ feature allows viewers to add real-time comments to videos, creating an interactive and community-driven viewing experience. Similarly, YouTube's ‘Dmooji’ feature enables viewers to add emoji and textual reactions to specific moments in the video, further enhancing user interactivity. Bearing these developments in mind, we analyze over 150 videos with bilingual or multilingual subtitles produced by non-Chinese content creators living in China. By employing multimodal discourse analysis (LeVine and Scollon 2004), we examine the collaborative processes involved in persona-building through video creation, content moderation, and the interaction facilitated by danmu and Dmooji. Drawing on recent scholarship on collective wisdom (Cizek and Uricchio 2022), translaboration (Zwischenberger 2020), and media engagement (Dahlgren and Hill 2023), we demonstrate that transcultural personae are the outcomes of multifaceted co-creation among creators, audiences, and the platform infrastructures. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics involved in online persona construction, highlighting the importance of social translation in this process.