On categorising online collaborative translation and the consequences for the field of research

ABSTRACT

Translation Studies possesses a plethora of meta-concepts such as ‘online collaborative translation’, ‘community translation’, ‘volunteer translation’, etc. to refer to phenomena like translation crowdsourcing, fansubbing, fandubbing, etc. The existence of these various meta-concepts reflects an obvious need to categorise and subsume such phenomena under a meta-category. The paper will attempt to explain why this is the case, why categorising in and of itself is vital and how it relates to boundaries and undertaking boundary-work, both crucial processes in academia. The paper will advocate, based on boundary-work, for using ‘online collaborative translation’ as a meta-category and conclude by presenting a conceptual map of this meta-category and its various sub-categorisations.

KEYWORDS:

• Online collaborative translation
• categorisation
• boundary-work
• meta-concepts
• conceptual map

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Facebook stopped its translation crowdsourcing in mid-April 2022 and has not revealed any further details regarding this move (Translate Facebook Team 2022).

2. Twitter stopped its translation crowdsourcing in November 2017 and has since switched entirely to neural machine translation (Translate Twitter 2022).

3. The contesting of empirically proven scientific facts during the Covid pandemic shows that boundaries, and thus any clear authority over scientific truth, are not permanent and unassailable, but rather that boundary-work is and must be continuous.

4. For an overview and critique of the use of ‘boundary-work’ in Translation Studies, see Grbić (2023, 115–116).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cornelia Zwischenberger

Cornelia Zwischenberger is Professor in Transcultural Communication at the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna. Prior to her appointment as professor at the University of Vienna in March 2020, Cornelia Zwischenberger held a professorship in Translation Studies at the University of Graz in Austria. Professor Zwischenberger has published numerous contributions on both Translation and Interpreting Studies. Cornelia Zwischenberger’s current research focuses on the use of the translation concept beyond Translation Studies from a transdisciplinary/transcultural perspective and on online collaborative translation as a prototypical form of transcultural communication. Together with Alexa Alfer she has been working on the blended concept of translaboration for several years now. She is the leader of the research group Transcult.com. Furthermore, her research also revolves around scientific theoretical questions such as the use of the appropriate concepts to narrate the evolution of the Translation Studies discipline.