USING FORUM COLLABORATIVE SETTINGS FOR TRANSLATION OUTCOMES: A THREAT TO TRANSLATION PROFESSIONALS?

Abstract

Translation and transcreation can both be considered as practices carried out by professionals trained in the communication of languages, cultures and situational settings. However, a growing number of internet users resort to the Internet to equip themselves with language knowledge, exploiting the collaborative setting the Internet provides. Online collaboration is based on the new culture of openness and engagement, which is negotiated via interaction with the final aim of providing a possible good, and “professional-like”, translation. As stated by Guyon (2010, 33), coordination and discussion between participants are part and parcel of the translation process. Although fora have thoroughly been discussed as a locus of empowerment (Zummo 2015, Alfer 2017), this collaborative setting has received little attention in language contexts from scholars. After a brief literature review, I introduce the corpus and methods, and then present my findings. My discussion focuses on the interactions among website users dealing with some generic and specialist words to be translated in the English/Italian cultural, social or professional contexts. Data for analysis were gathered from Wordreference, a popular website dealing with languages, with the aim of studying community practices involved with the mediation and collaboration processes, when negotiating meanings of culturally ambiguous words. Findings show that the collaborative nature of fora contributes to finding the best translation output as a result of the negotiation of meanings between different speakers belonging to different cultures and different professional backgrounds.