Engaged in Translation : Fandom Production in The Latin America's Anime Community of Syncrajo

Abstract: Fansub (Fan-subtitled) is the term coined after the action of subtitling a foreign audio-visual production. Fansubs started being studied after the phenomenon started gaining popularity within communities of anime fans that used them as a way of access to the products they desire to consume. This has created different opinions that range as a way of going against the “top-down corporate-driven process (using) a bottom-up consumer-driven process” (Jenkins, 2004, p.37) to remarks against their legality, as they modify and distribute a copyrighted work for free. The majority of the studies that had been made around fansub culture revolve around the experience of anime, and until recently started researching different kinds of media, like videogames, news videos, webpages and more. Even with the existence of these studies, few researchers focus on the motifs of the fansubbers (fans that do subtitles) to start doing them. This thesis will focus on studying how the members of this groups get engaged with a product to start doing free labour using the theories of Spectrum of engagement of Hill (2019). Also interesting to this thesis will be the idea of appropriation to understand if the fansub does something beyond the translation to take ownership of the product they re-distribute. In the last years, there has been a decrease of active fansubs, as new legal and accessible ways to get the content had been made available. This thesis argues how analysing the engagement of the different members of the community will help to understand the motifs and reasons behind for becoming a member; passing from consumers to producers, and how all of this process in an engagement process that also deals with the disengagement of the fans, a factor for the decrease of fansub communities specialized in anime.