The rules of the game: on the interplay between normative ideas and technology in an online amateur translation community

ABSTRACT

In recent years, translation researchers have paid increasing attention both to the social dynamics within translation communities as well as to how members of these communities view their own translation practices and the normative ideas they formulate for their activities. In this article, I adopt a diachronic perspective by focussing on the processes of construction, negotiation and consolidation of normative ideas on translation and community in an online amateur translation community. Based on a virtual ethnography in a self-organised community of amateur translators, I explore how its members navigate often conflicting ideas of what it means to translate and of what kind of community they want to be. I try to retrace how some ideas meet with resistance while others are agreed upon and eventually established as formalised ‘rules’. Drawing on ‘technography’, a framework from science and technology studies, particular focus is laid on the role of the technology behind the community. In this context, the article shows how the technological design of a community can play a vital part in shaping, consolidating and enforcing the normative views of translation held by amateur translators.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation community
• normative ideas
• virtual ethnography
• technology
• amateur translation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The framework ties in with actor-network theory (ANT) by adopting its central tenet of the methodological symmetry of human and non-human agency. However, it adds to ANT in that it not only distinguishes agency and non-agency, but different degrees of agency. In contrast to the approach of the social construction of technology (SCOT), technography does not only focus on the stage of the development and subsequent adaptation of technologies, but brings the development and use of technologies (and notably also the autonomous agency of technology) together in one analytical framework, trying to retrace socio-technical practices on a micro-level (Rammert 2016, 44ff.).

2. See Olohan (2011) for an application to translation studies.

3. This is a cumulative count. Since inactive profiles are not automatically removed from the platform, it is impossible to determine how many users are still active at any given point in time.

4. The proposal for the PhD thesis this article is based on was approved by an interdisciplinary faculty committee. A dedicated ethical clearance was not required by my university at the time.

5. The latter was decided after an administrator called attention to the French Youth Protection Act, since Translaville is registered in France.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Regina Rogl

Regina Rogl holds a PhD in translation studies/transcultural communication and is currently working as a post-doc researcher at the University of Vienna. She is a member of the research group SocoTrans (Socio-Cognitive Translation Studies: Processes and Network) and an associate researcher on the third-party funded research project Rethinking Translation Expertise: A Workplace Study (RETREX), led by Hanna Risku. Her research interests include digital translation practices, socio-technical conceptualisations of translation, non-professional translation/interpreting, and workplace research.