Subtitler’s Visibility: A Comparative Study on the Industrial Subtitles and the Fansubs for The Big Bang Theory

Digital technology has considerably changed the landscape of global audiovisual market. The prosperous digitization not only has transformed the mass consumption of audiovisual products, but essentially has revolutionized public audiovisual production. Originally as an institutionally controlled production, audiovisual translation has been largely freed by digital technology. For subtitling in particular, the emerging phenomenon of fansubbing exemplifies how the democratization of digital technology has significantly transformed translation activity in multiple aspects, particularly translator’s visibility; but the topic of visibility has rarely been revisited in a systematic manner. This study aims to examine how the subtitler’s visibility has been changed by the democratizing wave of digital technology. New domains supported by digital technology, such as user-generated content (UGC) and online social media (OSM), can afford translators ‘new visibility’ (Desjardin 2017). But this affordance may have different effects in different translation settings. It is, thus, argued that fansubbers, as demotic subtitlers, and industrial subtitlers may capitalize on digital technology to different extents, managing their visibilities differently. To interrogate their new visibility management, the present study comparatively analyses Warner Bros. industrial subtitlers’ and fansub group YYeTs’s Chinese subtitles for the same audiovisual text of The Big Bang Theory, season nine. Following Brighenti’s (2007) conceptualisation, visibility emerges from social actor’s interactions. Subtitling is arguably subtitler’s most significant and typical social interaction in their name. Through this comparative analysis on fansubber’s and industrial subtitler’s subtitles, how their visibilities are differed from each other in the digital age will be revealed in this study.