This chapter presents a case study of global TV site Viki (www.viki.com), which offers amateur subtitling in around 200 languages for media from around the world. It focuses on the ways in which fansubbing and fan repurposing of technology has been adopted in the corporate and media industries via crowdsourcing, underscoring the commerce/community tensions that characterise ‘participatory culture’. In its aim to overcome the geopolitical constraints that limit the availability of media in many parts of the globe, Viki deploys a legal, business framework that overrides the national and linguistic biases of professional subtitling and dubbing via the ‘chaos’ of fan agency and interventionist practice. It also pinpoints the critical role played by language and multilingual publics within the evolving dynamics of convergence. Finally, this case study explores claims that fansubbing and other forms of community translation may be contributing to the ongoing marginalisation of linguistically diverse publics by enabling industry players to continue to underserve minor language communities.
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