Online video translation and subtitling : examining emerging practices and their implications for media activism in South East Asia

This article examines the ways in which one organisation and a number of citizens have begun to make use of new video translation and subtitling/captioning technologies to address local and regional social and environmental justice issues in the South East Asia region. We conceptualise these emerging practices as instances of ‘citizen translation’ by connecting them with earlier work carried out around citizens’ media. In order to examine and analyse the practices of, motivations for, and (potential) impact of citizen translation, we carried out an online survey and a number of interviews with people who are doing or supporting citizen translation. We found that citizen translators see their practices as enacting their own political sensibilities and addressing a number of barriers to social and political participation; we also found that citizen translators have important contributions to make regarding how citizen translation might further develop.