The danmaku interface on Bilibili and the recontextualised translation practice: a semiotic technology perspective

ABSTRACT

The danmaku interface is a unique feature of video-sharing websites in Asia which allows “live” comments to be directly overlaid onto the video immediately upon being entered. Proceeding from the two-pronged model combining a semiotic resource perspective and a social practice perspective proposed by Djonov and van Leeuwen [2018. “Social Media as Semiotic Technology and Social Practice: the Case of ResearchGate’s Design and Its Potential to Transform Social Practice.” Social Semiotics 28 (5): 641–664] for analysing social media as semiotic technology, this article uses Bilibili.com, the most popular danmaku video website in China, as a case study and analyses the danmaku interface firstly as semiotic technology, exploring the interface design and the meaning-making it predetermines through the semiotic realisations of built-in technological features and semiotic resources it makes available to users, and secondly as a platform which supports and potentially transforms social practices. The argument of the latter will be guided by van Leeuwen’s [2008b. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press] method of social practice analysis and borne out by a comparison of the recontextualisation of audiovisual translation on Bilibili in the form of danmaku subtitling with the prevailing fansubbing practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Semiotic technology
• danmaku
• subtitling
• audiovisual translation
• fansubbing
• Bilibili

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the reviewers for their critical and inspirational comments on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Yuhong Yang is Lecturer in translation and interpreting at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, China. Her research interests include social semiotics, multimodal analysis, and translation studies. She has a PhD in Translation Studies from Sichuan University, China. This article is inspired by topics pursued in her PhD project “The Meaning Making Process in Interpreter-Mediated Television Events: A Multimodal Perspective” (2017).

Notes

1 Although users are kept anonymous, the danmaku file (.xml) has coded information of users which can tell us how many (different) users participated in posting danmaku comments.

Additional information

Funding

This article is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities. Grant No. JBK1901043.