[CFP] IATIS2021 Panel 1: Translation in the global media ecology: New patterns of translation and distribution in the streaming age
Deadline 24 September for abstracts
Panel 1: Translation in the global media ecology: New patterns of translation and distribution in the streaming age
Convenors: Jinsil Choi (Keimyung University), Jonathan Evans (University of Portsmouth) & Kyung Hye Kim (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
While there have been calls to ‘recenter globalization’ since the early 2000s (Iwabuchi 2002), the development of streaming media since the late 2000s has effectively disrupted older patterns of film and media distribution, leading to more access globally for what had been marginalised cultures in the global media ecology, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Nigeria. The contribution of streaming service platforms turned content creators such as Amazon, Netflix and Rakuten Viki is in the process of overturning previous understandings of the global mediasphere. Increasingly invested in international services, these companies’ practices fragment, deconstruct and reconfigure media space.
Translation is central to this, as these streaming providers offer most media content in translated versions, be it dubbed or subtitled, resulting in geographical boundaries becoming increasingly volatile and propelling cultural mobility. Not all such translations are official, and there continue to be thriving fan translation cultures on streaming platforms such as Youtube and Viki which offer access to media between ‘dominated’ cultures and as well between ‘dominating’ and ‘dominated’ cultures. This increasing fluidity is having a significant effect on Anglosphere understandings of world media, which had previously seen ‘foreign’ film and TV as elite, highbrow productions but now, especially through streaming platforms and fansubbing, more popular media such as Korean soap operas or Chinese teenage TV dramas are becoming widely available. At the same time, the massive abundance of available media around the globe is creating a scarcity of attention and affecting a new attention ecology (Citton 2017) which risks ‘dominated’ languages being overlooked in the sheer quantity of ‘dominating’ language production. This panel aims to explore the role of translation in the streaming age, especially in relation to the shifting definition of ‘peripheral/dominated’ and ‘central/dominating’ media producing cultures.
We welcome contributions critically addressing translation (understood broadly) in the global media environment that has been created in relation to streaming and on demand services.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
-Video streaming giants (e.g. Netflix, Amazon) and popular translation
-Transnational and translational co-productions for international streaming
-Shifting notions of centre/dominant and periphery/dominated and ways of retheorising the position of cultures in the current media ecology
-Streaming, translation and the media environment
-Economies of attention, digital distribution and translation
-Shadow economies of media translation and their effects on global circulation
-South-South or other ‘dominated-dominated’ translation practices (i.e. that do not pass through ‘dominant’ languages) for popular media
For informal enquiries: jonevanstranslation@gmail.com
Submission details: https://www.iatis.org/index.
https://www.iatis.org/index.php/7th-conference-barcelona-2021/item/2242-panels