Audiovisual translation and fandom

Fan-based audiovisual translation (AVT) constitutes a relatively new entry in the broader discipline of translation studies, only emerging as a recognizable phenomenon during the 1980s and beginning to attract dedicated research from the late 1990s onward. Significantly, this timeline mirrors that of AVT studies itself that, as Pérez-González (2014: 2) notes, ‘only began to gain traction after the surge of translation studies in the 1990s’. In this sense, these histories are conjoined. AVT ‘proper’ and its fan-based aberration developed contemporaneously. Nevertheless, within the discipline, fan AVT is typically identified as marginal, peripheral and ‘improper’. It is not difficult to understand why. Fan AVT forms part of the broad sphere of non-professional translation (see Pérez-González and Susam-Saraeva 2012) and is largely amateur, free, unregulated and even illegal. Prone to errors and inconsistencies, such translation activity tends to pass under the radar of much academic and industry discourse and research.