Engaged in Translation: Fandom Production in The Latin America’s Anime Community of Syncrajo. MKVM13: Media and Communication Studies: Master’s Thesis. 2021 Faculty of Social Science, Lund University Author – Emilio González González Pliego Supervisor: Tobias Linne Examiner: Annette Hill
[email protected] Word Count (21,187) Abstract Fansub (Fan-subtitled) is the term coined after the action of subtitling a foreign audio-visual production. Fansubs started being studied after the phenomenon started gaining popularity within communities of anime fans. That used them as a way of access to the products they desire to consume. Creating different opinions that range as a way of going against the “top- down corporate-driven process (using) a bottom-up consumer-driven process” (Jenkins, 2004, p.37) to remarks against their legality, as they modify and distribute a copyrighted work for free. The majority of the studies made around fansub culture revolve around the experience of anime, and until recently started researching different kinds of media, like videogames, news videos, webpages and more. Even with the existence of these studies, few researchers focus on the motifs of the fansubbers (fans that do subtitles) to start doing them. This thesis will focus on studying how the members of these groups get engaged with a product to start doing free labour using the theory of Spectrum of engagement of Hill (2019). Also interesting to this thesis. Will be the idea of appropriation to understand if the fansub does something beyond the translation to take ownership of the product fansubs re-distribute. In the last years, there has been a decrease of active fansubs, as new legal and accessible ways to get the content had been made available.