Acceso usuarios
Yiding Guo, Jieying Xiong, Zhong Lin
While translanguaging’s role in translation is well-documented, its sociopolitical implications in digitally mediated cross-boundary practices like amateur subtitling remain underexplored. This netnographic study examines how the subtitler @周一的日常吧 on Bilibili – a Chinese youth-centric platform – deploys crosslinguistic, inter-semiotic, trans-modal and inter-phonetic strategies to navigate linguistic hierarchies and algorithmic governance. Framed through Adorno’s, T. W. [1997. Negative dialectics (E. B. Ashton. Trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 1966)] ‘non-identity’, we argue translanguaging transcends creativity and criticality, operating dialectically to resist monolingual hegemony while reproducing platform capitalism’s extractive logics. Findings reveal that while hybrid practices destabilize static linguistic identities, they are constrained by Bilibili’s algorithmic commodification of diversity, which amplifies apolitical hybridity while suppressing politicised repertoires. Non-identity thus emerges as both a theoretical lens illuminating digital fluidity and a material practice entangled in neoliberal architectures that co-opt heterogeneity for engagement metrics. By centreing non-identity, the study shift translanguaging scholarship from celebratory fluidity to critiquing epistemic violence in platform mediated communication, where ‘inclusivity’ masks systemic inequities. The implications extend beyond audiovisual translation, offering a critical framework to analyze hybrid communication’s sociopolitical stakes under platform capitalism.
