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Judging Translation On Social Media: A Pragmatic Look At Youtube Comment Section

2020; Linguagem: Inglês

10.15405/epsbs.2020.08.91

2357-1330

Svetlana Kraeva, Ekaterina Krasnopeyeva,

Language, Communication, and Linguistic Studies

In recent years, the phenomenon of reception in social-media-driven translation was put on the map of Translation Studies. The figure of the recipient or the user of translation has become central in the research of mediatized translation spaces. This paper explores the pragmatics of viewer response to YouTube-mediated audiovisual user-generated translation (revoicing). The reported study is based on the corpus of comments on a popular Russian-language voiceover rendition of a PewDiePie video. We empirically describe intentions behind viewers’ commentary and document its potential as a practical tool for user-translators and researchers. We examine statistics on lexical level, including frequency, distribution and collocations. Quantitative data is used as a reference for the qualitative analysis of commenters’ communicative intention. The data shows that viewers communicate more positive than negative evaluations of the user-translators’ performance. In their statements, recipients express ther emotionally charged opinions on YouTube-mediated translation practices and audiovisual translation techniques (voiceover, dubbing, subtitling), and judge translation quality or the user-translators’ expertise as cultural mediators. The key communicative intentions identified in the data are the following: to convey praise and gratitude; express satisfaction or dissatisfaction with user-translator’s strategy or characteristics of the video; insult user-translator; give a directive so that the user-translator changes his/her strategy.