Fansubbing: Latest Trends and Future Prospects

As we advance into the digital age, the pervasive omnipresence and democratization of technology is progressively enhancing the co-creation and circulation of user-generated (UG), digital artifacts on the interactive version of the web, commonly known as the Web 2.0. Since the turn of the new millennium, prousers, prosumers (Toffler 1980) and produsers (Bruns 2008) united have intervened prolifically in a plethora of virtual spaces by producing an overabundant volume of DIY content relying on non-professional translation approaches to audiovisual products legally and illegally distributed on the Internet, with fandubbing and fansubbing leading the way. ‘Fansubbing’, a term coined back in the 1980s to define the activity of fans subtitling for fellow fans, was initiated in association with anime subculture (O’Hagan 2009), whereas, in the new millennium, ‘the second wave of fansubbing’ (Massidda 2019) flourished in conjunction with the so-called golden age of TV shows characterized by US TV productions ‘investing large amounts of cash in ambitious projects created by famous producers and directors’ (Massidda 2015: 114), relying on excellent scripts and featuring an endless list of actors belonging to the cinema industry. Although technological advances have transformed the mediascape and ‘aggrandized its potential with the introduction of new distribution channels aiming to reach wider and ever more global audiences’ (Diaz Cintas and Massidda 2019 forthcoming), the quantitative shift in audiovisual (AV) content produced for linear TV and Video Streaming on Demand (VoD), which went from small to immense in a few years, proved highly disruptive for producers, localisation service providers (LSPs) and consumers. In addition, the explosion of over-the-top (OTT) services such as Amazon Prime, HBO Now, Hulu and Netflix, along with the never-ending production of a wide variety of serialized formats, have swiftly raised the demand for AV content localisation across the globe. At the turn of the century, in the gigantic void produced by the fast pace of technological and cinematic changes, while LSPs were exploring viable options offered by new technology, amateur subtitlers around the globe were already forging alternative, internet-based localisation workflows, clockwork, perfect mechanisms able to deliver hundreds of fansubs within unprecedented tight turnaround times.