Translation on and over the web: disentangling conceptual uncertainties and ethical questions – an introduction

Web 2.0 and its potential to enable interaction between internet users and content creation has led to the emergence of relatively new translation phenomena, such as translation crowdsourcing, a practice that occurs in its paid and unpaid forms in both the profit and the non-profit sector. At times, translation crowdsourcing also occurs in combination with forms of machine translation involving human post-editing. Additionally, the self-translations occurring on social-media platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok, have also attracted the attention of Translation Studies scholars in recent years (Desjardins 2019).

These translation phenomena that do not just occur over but primarily on the Web have already been studied widely, both empirically and conceptually/theoretically, by Translation Studies scholars and others, although research into these phenomena is still relatively young. The first studies date back to the second half of the 2000s (e.g. Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez 2006, O’Hagan 2008) and basically followed the introduction and popularisation of Web 2.0 (O’Reilly 2005) that paved the way for interactive social-media platforms, such as Facebook (introduced in 2004) and Twitter (launched in 2006 and recently rebranded as X). Both platforms had their interfaces and updates translated by volunteer users and via translation crowdsourcing.

The web-based translation phenomena covered by this special issue all fall under, or at least may be associated with, the concept of ‘online collaborative translation’, which is where a source text is split among a group or even a multitude of translators, who all contribute to creating the final translated text. According to Zwischenberger (2022, and in this volume), ‘online collaborative translation’ subsumes solicited as well as non-solicited forms of these translation phenomena. The solicited forms of ‘online collaborative translation’ contain various types of both paid and unpaid translation crowdsourcing for the profit and non-profit sector. Typical examples of translation crowdsourcing for the profit oriented sector involving volunteer (and thus unpaid) translators are the examples of Facebook and Twitter, mentioned above. However, translation crowdsourcing is also occurring more frequently in its remunerated form within the translation industry, with some platforms having offered such work for about 15 years (Garcia 2015). There is also non-remunerated translation crowdsourcing for the non-profit sector: translating for TED or Translators without Borders (TwB) could serve as examples here. In such cases, the control and management of the translation process as well as the decision about which texts to translate rests with the institution, company or organisation that has outsourced the translation project and launched a specific call to translate. ‘Online collaborative translation’ also subsumes various unsolicited types of translation, such as translating Wikipedia pages or the various forms of online fan translations (fansubbing, fandubbing, scanlation and translation hacking). With these unsolicited practices based on volunteer translation, both the control and management of the translation process and the decision to translate reside with the communities engaged with those specific online translations.

The categorisation we have just outlined – solicited and unsolicited online collaborative translation – provides the framework for the organisation and structure of the contributions collected in this special issue. As noted, these translation phenomena and their communities or ‘crowds’ have already been studied widely and from multiple perspectives. Among the most researched topics we find the study of the motivation of participants who act as volunteers and, therefore, without remuneration for their work (e.g. Dombek 2014; Olohan 2014; Mesipuu 2012). Attention has also been paid to workflows and to the internal organisation of online communities and crowds (e.g. Li 2017; Massidda 2015; Orrego-Carmona 2015; Rogl 2023 and in this volume). This has been accompanied by textual comparison between the translations produced by largely non-professional communities, such as fansubbing groups, and the official versions of subbed films or series produced by paid professionals (e.g. Massidda 2015, Bruti 2015). A related theme explores the translation quality that these communities or crowds, composed mostly of non-professional volunteers, are capable of delivering (e.g. Jiménez-Crespo 2011; McDonough Dolmaya 2015).

In her overview of the research into ‘online collaborative translation’, Zwischenberger (2022) has identified two research lacunae which this special issue attempts to contribute to fill (while also moving beyond them). Firstly, ethical questions are rarely addressed directly and as a clear research focus in Translation Studies literature devoted to ‘online collaborative translation’. Usually, ethical questions are only mentioned in passing and it is rare to find an ethical framework for the study of the translation practices subsumed here under the concept of ‘online collaborative translation’. Most authors seem content with branding certain practices as ethically (or rather morally) wrong, or exploitative, or at least questionable within the context in which they occur. However, there is no in-depth explanation as to what informs this kind of judgements or problematising statements. Frequently, the question of ethics is related to legality, since many of the translation practices under discussion (especially the various types of online fan translations) are legally forbidden as they violate copyright law or try to evade censorship regulations (e.g. Hemmungs Wirtén 2013; Wang & Zhang 2017).

Secondly, there is a plethora of meta-concepts associated with the translation phenomena examined in this special issue. Top-level concepts such as ‘user-generated translation’, ‘online social translation’, and ‘volunteer translation’ are only a few examples of the labels frequently encountered next to ‘online collaborative translation’. Furthermore, these concepts are often used as synonyms, without considering whether they are actually appropriate descriptors for all the translation phenomena outlined above. This is largely because hardly any conceptual work has been undertaken by Translation Studies scholars regarding the proposed meta-concepts. To unlock a concept’s full heuristic potential, a conceptual analysis must dissect the concept by seeing how it has been defined in disciplines and fields of research that have the most expertise using it, as well as by identifying the concepts related to it in a conceptual network. ‘Collaboration’ is a case in point as it is often simply used in its everyday meaning of ‘working together’ in Translation Studies literature. In order to move beyond using a concept as a mere label, it is necessary to look into disciplines and fields of research in which a given concept is employed as a core concept. For the concept of ‘online collaborative translation’, Organisation Studies seems to be an appropriate field as ‘collaboration’ is a core concept there (Zwischenberger 2023, 7, Zwischenberger 2020).

The multitude of potential candidates for a top-level concept to be used as a descriptor for all types of collaborative translation taking place on and over the Web may be traced back, on the one hand, to the fact that the field of research subsuming these translation phenomena is still relatively young and going through a consolidation phase. On the other hand, the situation also suggests uncertainty, dissent and, to a certain extent, chaos. Yet the existence of a plethora of candidates for top-level descriptors also suggests a deep yearning for subsuming multiple translation phenomena under one bigger scheme, thus bringing order into the field through effective categorisation.

The first contribution to this special issue is an effort to go precisely in this direction. In her paper, ‘On categorising online collaborative translation and the consequences for the field of research’, Cornelia Zwischenberger shows the rationale and need for effective academic categorising. She does so against the backdrop of voices within the field of ‘online collaborative translation’ that have spoken out or have at least expressed some reservations against categorising these relatively new translation phenomena per se and subsuming them under a meta-concept. Zwischenberger argues in favour of ‘online collaborative translation’ as such a meta-descriptor. She adopts the notion of ‘boundary-work’ (Gieryn 1983), which addresses how to set boundaries and thus how to define relevant categories. She also analyses competing arguments and classifications, ultimately presenting a conceptual map that shows how the various sub-concepts or sub-categories of ‘online collaborative translation’ relate to this central meta-concept as well as the place they occupy in this emerging field.

Translation crowdsourcing as a solicited form of ‘online collaborative translation’ is a relatively well-researched category, with one exception: there is still little research on paid translation crowdsourcing platforms, which have been around for at least 15 years (Garcia 2015) and are becoming more common within the translation industry. Yet there is hardly any empirical research into these translation platforms, involving surveys, interviews or observational research. The few exceptions to date are Gough and Perdikaki (2018), Fırat (2021,) and Gough et al. (2023), which all surveyed the translators working for or on some of these translation platforms. Fırat (2021) focused on the working conditions of translators on such digital platforms, conducting an online survey among 70 translators, all of whom resided in Turkey. He rather unsurprisingly found that labour conditions on these platforms often fall (considerably) short of decent standards, which led him to coining the concept of ‘uberization of translation’ (Fırat 2021). Gough and Perdikaki (2018) carried out a survey among 43 translators working with the cloud-based CAT-tool Smartcat, which offers a built-in function for splitting a translation project among various translators, who then work on the text concurrently. Gough and Perdikaki (2018) also conducted two small-scale observational studies with translators working on Smartcat, while Gough et al. (2023) surveyed 804 translators, asking them about their experiences with various platforms offering concurrent translation. The result showed that the vast majority of the translators surveyed expressed negative opinions about working in concurrent mode as well as on the platforms themselves (Gough et al. 2023, 17).

These studies, however, do not offer a clear and explicit definition of what is meant by a ‘translation platform’. Sometimes the definition seems to include not only platforms for paid translation crowdsourcing but also marketplaces like Proz.com (Fırat 2021), or a mixture of platforms providing paid translation crowdsourcing and cloud-based CAT-environments (Gough et al. 2023). The reasons for the overall scarcity of empirical research into ‘translation platforms’ or ‘translation platforms for paid crowdsourcing’ may well be, therefore, the lack of a clear understanding of their nature. There is also no comprehensive overview of available platforms, apart from a few, far from exhaustive, listings (Garcia 2015, 2017; Jiménez-Crespo 2021). As a result, these translation platforms, their operators, as well as the translators working on and for them, are hard to locate. Furthermore, even when they can be identified, it may be difficult to gain access to these actors, since (from what is known to date) the working conditions and remuneration offered are rather poor. Consequently, most of the existing research focuses on studying the outward representation and communication of translation crowdsourcing platforms, in the form of the information they provide on their respective websites.

Two papers included in this special issue focus on platforms offering paid translation crowdsourcing, aiming to contribute to our developing understanding of this phenomenon. Miguel Jiménez-Crespo, in his paper ‘Of professionals, non-professionals and everything in between: redefining the notion of the “translator” in the crowdsourcing era’, analyses the potential impact of paid translation crowdsourcing on translators’ status via a study of the discourses found on the websites of a number of platforms. The author studies a corpus based on the external representations and communications of some of the large players in the paid translation crowdsourcing industry. The article uses the online corpus analysis tool Sketch Engine, which also provides visualisations of ‘Word Sketches’ for key terms such as ‘translator’ and ‘quality’. The analysis shows that the public discourse of platforms offering paid translation crowdsourcing largely focuses on the technologies and workflows they offer, rather than on the translators working for them. If the translators are mentioned at all in these public-facing texts, they are presented in a positive light, with positive attributes attached to them. While the impact of these websites on the translators’ image and status cannot be fully ascertained, the study clearly shows that these platforms do not operate with a monolithic notion of quality, as is often the case with more ‘conventional’ translation service providers, where ‘maximum quality’ is the standard baseline for service. The platforms examined by Jiménez-Crespo, instead, operate with various tiers of quality – and they charge their clients accordingly.

In ‘Towards an ethical framework for evaluating paid translation crowdsourcing and its consequences’, Leandra Cukur focuses on the ethical implications of working on these same kinds of platforms, both for translators and clients. Looking at the working conditions and payment systems offered by a number of platforms, Cukur develops an ethical framework based on the values constituting a good life. She draws primarily on the four classical principles of biomedical ethics proposed by Beauchamp and Childress (2012) – beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice – and their corresponding values. Adopting this framework, she offers a method for the systematic evaluation of the ethical implications surrounding the labour practices commonly used across these platforms. Cukur applies these principles to translators and clients. The latter have so far hardly received any attention in the literature relating to these platforms. Like Jiménez-Crespo, Cukur analyses information available on the platforms’ websites (including published material and exchanges on public fora). Overall, and rather unsurprisingly, the balance in terms of ethical implications for translators working with platforms offering paid translation crowdsourcing is quite negative, and thus does not provide a good basis for a sustainable professional future.

Not all crowdsourcing initiatives are paid like the ones relating to the translation platforms described by Jiménez-Crespo and Cukur. In the case of unpaid voluntary translation crowdsourcing, the call to translate can either be initiated by a non-profit organisation or by a profit-oriented company. Prominent cases of profit-oriented crowdsourcing are the big social media companies Facebook, Twitter, and Skype, which have used their respective language communities as a way to translate their websites for free. On Facebook, for example, the volunteers were motivated to translate because they wanted to contribute to their online communities (Dombek 2014). However, in the case of LinkedIn, which is a networking platform for professionals, many translators who work for a living were offended at the thought of volunteering for a for-profit organisation (McDonough Dolmaya 2011). Such unpaid crowdsourcing raises questions that have thus far hardly been explored within an explicitly ethical framework (Zwischenberger 2022). The issue becomes especially thorny when non-profit companies reveal their ties to the corporate world. Crowdsourced language data may then be used for for-profit purposes as well, as is the case with Translators without Borders (Piróth and Baker 2020) and the organisation TED (Li in this volume).

The blurring between translating as a leisure activity and producing content that is meaningful for corporations can be read through the concepts of work and labour. One possible distinction between the two is based on Marx’s thought: while labour generates surplus value, and thus is subject to capitalist appropriation and exploitation, work creates social value (Zwischenberger and Alfer 2022). Using the notion of ‘free labour’, Terranova (2013), for example, points to the problematic capitalist acquisition and privatisation of labour happening in digital spaces. According to Zwischenberger and Alfer (2022) both labour and work are present at the same time in translation crowdsourcing as, on the one hand, volunteer translators create commodities for companies which generate profit and, on the other hand, they form meaningful social relations and raise their own social capital. Another way to relate these online practices to capitalist exploitation is through the concept of ‘immaterial labour’ as demonstrated in the contribution by Li in this volume. ‘Immaterial labour’ (Hardt and Negri 2004) is similar to Terranova’s (2013) ‘free labour’ and has the same inherent duality as described by Zwischenberger and Alfer (2022), i.e. it involves the co-creation of cultural and communicative value which is, at the same time, appropriated by capitalism.

In her paper ‘Crowdsourced translation as immaterial labour: a netnographic study of Communities of Practice in the TED translation project’, Boya Li outlines the friction between the TED company and their translator communities. For this purpose, she conducted a netnography including archival data from public discussions and interview data from two groups of TED translators in which she participated herself. To illustrate her case, she applies a Marxist autonomist view and the notion of ‘immaterial labour’. Connecting this form of labour with Communities of Practice (CoP), Li aptly shows how peer learning and meaning-making (aimed at becoming part of a community) feed into an individual’s social identity, allowing translator networks on TED to transform into collaborative communities with mutual goals and aspirations. Translators who are active in these communities are not university-trained; instead, they learn by understanding the standards and routines of the individual CoPs. However, the CoPs’ goals do not necessarily overlap with TED’s ambitions. While the translators’ CoPs try to achieve their own objectives, such as improving their translation skills or increasing the visibility of minority cultures, Li concludes that TED’s top-down approach to decisions produces tensions, undermining and weakening the CoP’s group dynamics.

Li’s contribution demonstrates the negative influences that can be exercised by the dominant party soliciting the translations. In all instances of crowdsourcing, in fact, contributors can be said to have a limited agency due to the constraints placed upon them by the soliciting party.

The final four contributions in this special issue address unsolicited forms of online collaborative translation, showing the different challenges that arise in these contexts.

The bottom-up approach of community translations theoretically allows for a more democratised structure. However, even translation communities will follow hierarchical structures and assign different roles to individuals, thereby copying labour divisions in paid translation projects (see e.g. Massidda 2015). This is the case in three of the contributions in this last group, which identify, respectively, administrators for Wikipedia claiming norm authority (Hu), a project manager overseeing teamwork (Pan and Xiao), and a site founder who ultimately has control over technological solutions (Rogl). As these contributions show, maintaining and building a community goes hand in hand, in each case, with fierce negotiations over meanings, social relations and norms.

Wikipedia as a community-run online encyclopaedia falls within unsolicited forms of online collaborative translation. Its entries are typically a mix of new content and translations. Additionally, they can be continuously edited and revised, with the revision history published online alongside the entries. Consequently, a translation is never really finished, which makes Wikipedia an especially interesting case of online collaborative translation. On top of that, the site lends itself particularly well to the study of meaning construction and of negotiations between contributors, due to an easily accessible forum called ‘Talk pages’. The Talk pages automatically archive discussion surrounding a particular Wikipedia article. Analysis of these exchanges have led to Wikipedia being framed as a site of dissent rather than harmony, even though editors typically pursue the common goal of knowledge sharing (see e.g. Jones 2019). Jones (2023) has also shown how contributors construct their intellectual authority and try to establish themselves as a valuable part of the community through their interactions on the Talk pages.

Bei Hu’s paper, ‘Negotiation, power and ethics in online collaborative translation: translation of “COVID-19” by Wikipedia translator-editors’, explores the ethical implications of such negotiation practices in the Talk pages of the Chinese version of the COVID-19 Wikipedia entry. The discussion centres on the translation of the disease’s name over a period of roughly two years, with the most edits occurring in 2020, and the last updates to the discussion occurring in August 2022. Hu employs a novel, mixed-methods approach to analysing the relevant Talk pages, combining quantitative data from a social network analysis and qualitative data from a dialogue act analysis. Framing the interactions within Pym’s (2012) ethics of cooperation allows the discussions to be explained in terms of rational egoistic actions, as translator-editors try to realise their own ideologies but ultimately strive for consensus. Most interestingly, the results of the analysis reveal that the negotiation processes reflect already existing divides between sociocultural groups. Translators’ conception of how to translate COVID-19 aligns with their cultural background and personal goals, with translator-editors even signalling their affiliation in their signatures. The paper also points to ongoing power dynamics within Wikipedia, citing the example of an administrator-editor possibly abusing their status to steer the conversation in their preferred direction.

Hu’s study is a good example of how individual assumptions and the cultural background of translators can play a role in the formation of personal ethics. Personal ethics cannot be dismissed in favour of professional or community ethics that inform translation strategies. This is especially the case with unpaid online collaborative translation, where personal motivation is the reason volunteers choose to translate. Several Translation Studies scholars have rejected the demand for the translators’ and interpreters’ neutrality and impartiality. Inghilleri (2012, 40), for example, refers to personal ethics as an ‘inescapable burden of individual conscience’ that is based on individual values and beliefs and is thus an integral part of the translator as an individual. In a similar vein, Lambert (2023) includes a responsibility to personal ethics alongside the responsibilities that translators and interpreters have towards the client, the author, the readers, the profession and the wider society. Chesterman and Baker (2008) introduce the concept of ‘telos’ to incorporate the personal needs and desires of the individual translator that exist alongside ‘skopos’, the intended purpose of a translation. Taking volunteer translators’ telos into consideration allows for a more nuanced picture of their motivation to participate in an online collaborative translation initiative. As we have also seen in Li’s contribution to this volume, the CoPs’ teloi do not always correspond to the ambitions of a company such as TED – a tension which leads to alienation.

With large numbers of translators collaborating, negotiations and compromises are inevitable. This is especially true for unsolicited initiatives with flat hierarchies, as usually no single party has the final say, and the dominant roles have to be distributed and negotiated first. This points to yet another area of potential ethical deliberations. Pan and Xiao (in this volume), for example, show how interpersonal considerations, such as the desire to keep the peace and avoid conflict, can lead to diminished translators’ agency. Interpersonal conflicts and compromises are hardly ever addressed in Translation Studies but can be crucial in decision-making processes, especially in online collaborative translation.

Qi Pan and Weiqing Xiao, in their contribution ‘Revisiting risk management in online collaborative literary translation: ethical insights from the Chinese context’, examine a collaborative translation initiative on Yeeyan Gutenberg Project. Yeeyan Gutenberg Project aims to translate and circulate literary works. Instead of the traditional translate-edit-proofread workflow, the texts are distributed among multiple volunteers who assume both the roles of translators and revisers throughout the translation process. This requires close collaboration. To gain access to Yeeyan Gutenberg Project, the lead author participated in the translation of the collection of short stories Waifs and Strays. The authors then collected data through a cognitive ethnography, using screen recordings, retrospective think-aloud protocols and semi-structured interviews. Elaborating on Pym’s (2015, 2020) risk management framework, Pan and Xiao explore how the collaboration impacts the way translators make decisions, and consequently outline how translation risks are distributed among the team members. They add interpersonal risk to Pym’s categories of communicative risk, credibility risk and uncertainty risk, to account for the interactive nature of online collaborative translation projects. The authors found that, in many instances, problems were passed on to the revision or editing stage and thus, to a team member, instead of being resolved as they first emerged. Transferring risks back and forth between translators and editors in such a way may in fact even prolong the translation process.

While the contributions by Li, Hu, and Pan and Xiao cover the tensions and collaborations arising in already established communities (whether they are solicited, as in the case of TED and the translation platforms, or unsolicited, as in the case of Wikipedia and Yeeyan Gutenberg Project), the penultimate paper in this special issue focuses on negotiations surrounding the formation of a community and its understanding of translation. It is essential for a community to establish some guidelines for its members. Similar studies have already been conducted on Wikipedia. For example, Góngora-Goloubintseff (2021) traces how Wikipedia’s participants agree on translation standards. This can be done in an explicit way, in the form of codes of ethics and practice. Drugan (2011) finds that the ethics codes of online collaborative communities differ considerably from the codes of professional associations. Community guidelines emphasise shared values and outline possible sanctions in the event of non-compliance, while professional codes tend to focus more on the rights and duties of translators. However, the translation standards of Wikipedia, for example, do not always correspond to how they are applied by contributors in specific language communities (Góngora-Goloubintseff 2021).

In ‘The rules of the game: on the interplay between normative ideas and technology in an online amateur translation community’, Regina Rogl addresses the process through which members in an amateur translation community, Translaville, negotiate community guidelines. Notably, she devotes special attention to which normative ideas are embedded and solidified in the technical design of the platform and how users might circumvent the resulting limitations. Over the course of 18 months from 2018 to 2019, Rogl conducted a virtual ethnography, participating as a translator, collecting archival data through the community’s forum, documenting field observations, and carrying out interviews. The analysis shows that not all of the views that most members agreed upon actually made it into the written guidelines of the community. Normative ideas about quality or the translation process were more likely to be formalised at some point, while community-related issues tended to remain on the level of unofficial expectations. Additionally, members avoided establishing guidelines on the more complex issues, in order to prevent possible oversimplification. The community has also remained firm on a complete ban on machine translation. Some of these norms have been converted into technological solutions, thus solidifying them further (e.g. restricting certain actions or automatically sanctioning users for misconduct).

Rogl’s contribution emphasises the role that technological structures play in online collaborative translation. Any community or crowd depends on an online environment, be it a forum, or a more advanced interface with a proprietary CAT-environment, as can be found in environments hosting solicited forms of collaborative translation, such as translation platforms. Recently, the TED organisation switched from the Amara subtitling platform to CaptionHub, a move which had an impact on workflows and on the actions that could be taken by volunteers (Li in this volume). Technological possibilities (or impossibilities) and how they (dis)enable participation is a still under-researched aspect of online collaborative translation.

This special issue opens with a contribution on categorising online collaborative translation and its solicited and unsolicited sub-types. The collection comes full circle with a final contribution that undertakes further categorisation work in one of these sub-categories, namely online collaborative fan translation, which falls under the unsolicited type. Rocío Baños and Jorge Díaz Cintas aim to ‘disentangle the conceptual uncertainties surrounding these new AVT practices […]’ (Baños and Díaz Cintas in this volume). In their paper ‘Exploring new forms of audiovisual translation in the age of digital media: cybersubtitling and cyberdubbing’, they focus on the two concepts or practices of ‘fansubbing’ and ‘fandubbing’. They contend that these concepts are at times stretched too far in the respective literature, expanding to contain translation practices that simply would not fall within their scope, such as ‘activist subtitling’, ‘parodic dubbing’, ‘fake dubbing’. They suggest the two concepts or categories of ‘cybersubtitling’ and ‘cyberdubbing’, so that these various (translation) practices can be accommodated and to avoid erroneously categorising all typologies as fan activities. The paper also tackles ethical questions, arguing that certain sub-categories of ‘cybersubtitling’ and ‘cyberdubbing’ such as ‘fansubbing’, ‘fandubbing’ and altruist translation practices are particularly prone to questioning from an ethical/moral perspective, as these practices are performed by volunteers that are not remunerated but still contribute considerably to furthering a cause or brand with their invested labour.

While the contributions in this special issue cover a wide range of contexts and categories, they all have something in common: they show that online collaborative translation has great potential as a field of research in Translation Studies. However, in order to strengthen its position further, closer attention needs to be paid to the use of concepts and categorisations. Zwischenberger (2022 and in this volume) makes a compelling case for ‘online collaborative translation’ as a meta-concept. Baños and Díaz Cintas (in this volume) elaborate on the concepts of ‘cybersubtitling’ and ‘cyberdubbing’ as sub-categories that, however, are capacious enough to include translations performed by a single author, which fall outside the scope of online collaborative translation. Taken together, the contributions collected here lay the foundations for much work that still needs to be undertaken in order to group and organise the range of phenomena relating to online collaborative translation and, in the process, make them less elusive.

The contributions also highlight how online collaborative translation is in many ways a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it creates a sense of belonging and a community spirit, so that volunteers as well as paid translators are clearly motivated to engage with such initiatives. Additionally, online collaborative translation responds to a need, as there are not enough traditional language service providers and experienced translators to handle the insurmountable translation demand on the internet, especially when it comes to minority languages. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, online collaborative translation leaves volunteers and paid translators vulnerable to a multitude of risks and harmful practices, such as (capitalist) exploitation, unfair treatment, injustice, loss of autonomy, and lack of control over their user-generated data. This special issue can only address a limited number of these topics. More research is therefore needed, for instance in the area of gamification, which was not touched upon in this collection, or with regard to the exploitation of fan labour. Our hope is that this volume will encourage further work in these and many other emerging areas.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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.

Leandra Cukur

Leandra Cukur holds a BA in Transcultural Communication and an MA in Translation from the University of Vienna and is currently working as a research assistant as part of the research group Transcult.com at the Centre for Translation Studies in Vienna. Her research interests include the impact of online collaborative translation on the translation profession, especially the use of translation crowdsourcing in professional settings and its ethical implications. In her PhD thesis, she aims to shed light on the design and role of translation platforms and to explore their usefulness and drawbacks for translators.