Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This paper examines the fan practice of the production of VTuber fansub clips, focusing on those translating from Japanese to English, and argues that fans-astranslators prioritize its use as a canvas to reproduce and validate their moe; affective responses formulated within and packaged for otaku discourse, towards the source text, the VTuber within, and the VTuber and otaku culture beneath it to their communities, with translation acting as a form and vessel to deliver their work to the desired target language.VTubers, or Virtual YouTubers, are part of a subsection of otaku culture referring to actors that use motion-capture technology to move an avatar, designed in a contemporary anime/manga aesthetic, as part of a video or livestream.Fansub clips are a fan practice of producing recompiled, remixed sections of a VTuber s livestream that fans want to highlight into a separate video (clip), and then adding translations in the form of subtitles to an intended target language audience (fansub).These fanmade works serve to deliver VTubing to a foreign audience, akin to previous fan translations of otaku media, but unlike these preceding forms, require fans to cut and frame parts of the source text, inherently transgressing on the sanctity of the source text s integrity in their translations, which historically would be of much dismay to translation-critical otaku abroad.Rather than viewing mutual intelligibility as the end goal, this paper theorizes that fansub clips are only marked translations and consumed as such because they adhere to the precedents of previous otaku translations, and serve more to share and reproduce the fan-astranslator s affect.The multiplicity of fansub clips with distinct and complementary translation approaches also produces an environment where viewers must piece together bits and pieces of collective VTuber knowledge through the consumption of individualized viewpoints, encouraging them to become in tune with or involved Transcommunication Vol.
Author: Jukanto, Nigel Harimann
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7112840201
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