20th European Symposium on Languages for Special Purposes (LSP), Vienna, Austria, 8 - 10 July 2015, pp.67
This study is primarily intended to describe fansubbing in Turkey and draft a
fansubber profile on the basis of a corpus mainly consisting of interviews with
“famous” Turkish fansubbers who are seemingly invited for an interview to defend
themselves against explicit and implict allegations and attacks. The corpus is
comprised of two types of data source, namely print and online media. Drawing on
the views of the interviewees, the corpus analysis has revealed that the present study
can be built on such matters as legality/ethics, professional recognition, visibility,
motives of fansubbing, remunaration, popularity, genre preference, linguistic
proficiency, translation process, and demographics. Together with the literature
review, the analyses have shown that the most serious accusation brought against
fansubbers is copyright infringement (Hatcher, 2005), i.e. “pirating”, whereas the
mildest would be mistranslation. Although legal concerns are generally thought to
stand out as the severest matter, it is interesting that almost no confrontation exists
between fansubbers and copyright holders (Díaz-Cintas and Sánchez, 2006) but
with colleagues and subtitling critics (viewers, columnists or scholars). Thus, it can
be speculated that professional recognition is the primary concern of fansubbers
although their undertaking is a non-profit voluntary work. From this viewpoint,
this study focuses, as its secondary concern, on Turkish fansubbers’ endeavour to
exist as professionals rather than incompetent amateurs.