“Translation by fans for fans”: organization and practices in a Spanish-language community of scanlation
Objective: To describe the organization and literacy practices of a Spanish-speaking scanlation community (a group of fans who collaborate on the Internet to scan, translate and distribute mangas) by examining the community members’ roles and activities, the online environments in which they work and the resources they use.
Methodology: The study employed cyberethnographic techniques to create and analyse a database comprising 97 videos of onscreen activity, 32 transcripts of comments drawn from Facebook, blogs, forums and chats, 96 scanned manga chapters and, finally, six semi-structured interviews.
Results: The scanlation community in question assigned its members specific roles (of cleaning, translating, typesetting or correcting) and the members worked in a variety of online environments (email, Facebook, forums and chats). Members interacted to negotiate the development of projects, troubleshoot and exchange knowledge and expertise. Their literacy practices were regulated by the shared culture of scanlation communities as these exist worldwide, evidenced in the existence of a set of ethical standards, a common repertory of tools (translators, dictionaries, inventories of fonts, etc.) and a series of specific, socially valued semiotic practices (such as maintaining Japanese honorific suffixes in translations). This sophisticated level of organization challenges the notion that the cultural products of these vernacular and plurilingual practices are merely the result of their individual members’ creativity or of the spontaneous collaboration between them.