Elsevier

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume 170, December 2020, Pages 20-36
Journal of Pragmatics

Translating the other: Communal TV watching of Korean TV drama

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2020.07.002Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Communal TV watching affordances on streaming platforms join international audiences.

  • Timed comments are multifunctional, among them the translation of culture.

  • The participation structure allows fans to contribute to the fictional artefact.

Abstract

Our research is situated in the field of the pragmatics of fiction (Jucker and Locher, 2017; Messerli, 2017), and explores a website that makes Asian drama series and movies accessible to an international audience by means of fan generated subtitles in over 150 languages (www.viki.com; Dwyer, 2012, 2017). The streaming site offers a social network and participatory element in that it provides viewers with different possibilities of participation. Next to producing subtitles in teams, members can comment on episodes and actors, rate shows, produce their own videos, write to each other, etc. This paper explores the possibility of viewers commenting on the episode while it is being watched as a dynamic form of active reception. These comments are time-aligned with the video, which acts as the pivot of the interaction. Viewers can read other fans' comments, and can contribute their own comments and thus their own voice to this additional communal layer of drama series reception. Despite the fact that viewers typically view episodes and read/write comments asynchronously, a simultaneous viewing experience among an international community is created. We present a case study of the viewing of the first episode of two series and show how the commenters negotiate a number of issues, which include expectations about genre, character development, intertextuality and culture. We demonstrate that engaging with the video through written comments, engaging with each other in these comments and participating cross-linguistically are highly interactive, pragmatic achievements between different modes of communication of which the video itself is the starting point. Crucially, the timed comments also contribute to translating and making sense of the cultural ‘other’ as rendered in the videos. This is particularly the case in the comments on culture triggered by the video but also transpires in dialogues between the members.

Keywords

Lay translation
Timed comments
Intercultural communication
Korean television drama
Othering

Cited by (0)

Miriam A. Locher is Professor of the Linguistics of English at the University of Basel. Her research is on interpersonal pragmatics, linguistic politeness, relational work, the exercise of power, disagreements, advice-giving (in health contexts), computer-mediated communication, as well as online fan translations of politeness in Korean TV dramas into lingua franca English. Her publications comprise monographs, edited collections and special issues as well as a numerous articles in journals and collections. Website: https://english.philhist.unibas.ch/en/persons/miriam-locher/profile/. Contact information: [email protected]

Thomas C. Messerli is a researcher and lecturer in English Linguistics and in Digital Humanities at the University of Basel, and a lecturer and researcher in English at the School of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. His doctoral dissertation was on “Repetition in Telecinematic Humour – How US American sitcoms employ repetitive patterns in the construction of multimodal humour” and he has published on the participation framework of film and television reception and on humorous communication in sitcoms and in online social networks. Some of his current research areas include community subtitling and active viewership, evaluative discourses in online book reviews, and humour and aggression online. Website: www.thomasmesserli.com. Contact information: [email protected]