Human translation

As one of the leading MOOC platforms in the world, Coursera now has a well-established global translator community, which consists of Coursera learners who translate course subtitles from English into over 65 languages.23 _{Anyone who is fluent in English and one}

other language can join this community. The Coursera Chinese community landing page has detailed instructions for people who want to be translators and a number of translation rules. Translators use Smartling, a cloud-based translation management platform that is integrated into Coursera, to work. Some other MOOC platforms work in

23_{https://coursera.community/gtc-news-announcements-17/join-the-coursera-global-translator-community-45}

partnership with crowdsourcing platforms for translating their MOOCs. For example, edX works with transifex,24 _{and Udacity works with Amara.}25

Another example is Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS),26 _an

independent grassroots project in Taiwan initially designed to translate and adopt MIT OpenCourseWare27 _{(it now also includes some courses by Harvard University, Yale}

University and Utah State University) for the Great China Region, mainly run by volunteers from various disciplines worldwide. Similar to Coursera, OOPS also has a translation community. On the home page of OOPS, there is a clear entry point for people who want to join its translation community (see Figure 2.3). Once potential users have submitted the basic information online, including which language pair they can work with (English-Chinese or Japanese-Chinese), an editor will contact them directly. Lee et al. (2007) found that the success and sustainability of the community are related to three key issues: democratic leadership, participation incentives, and a forum for discussion and story sharing.

24_{https://www.transifex.com (Accessed: 5 March 2019)} 25_{https://amara.org/en/ (Accessed: 5 March 2019)} 26_{http://www.myoops.org (Accessed: 5 March 2019)}

27 _{A web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content (https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm Accessed: 5 March}

Figure 2.3 Home page of OOPS

Regarding the tools for translating MOOCs, the work of Beaven et al. (2013) may be insightful. They researched a MOOC on open translation tools and practices. The MOOC aims to help students learn a range of online open translation tools (Amara, Transifex, Google Translator Toolkit) for the crowdsourcing of translation, dubbing and subtitling. Participants in the MOOC undertake hands-on translating work (from and into Spanish/English, French/English, and Brazilian Portuguese/English) by using different translation tools. The findings show that while MOOCs do play a role in bringing communities together to some extent, they don't always achieve effective collaboration, so the results in translation output are variable and there are challenges in quality assurance. They concluded that crowdsourcing can be the only solution to meet the large demand for the open translation of MOOCs.

At this point in time, there is no evidence of professional translation of MOOCs in China. Rather, MOOCs are translated either by amateur subtitling groups who are in partnership with MOOC platforms or by crowdsourcing. For instance, the EduInfinity Translation Group (http://www.edu-infinity.org/) is a Chinese fansub group which focuses on translating subtitles for MOOCs. They cooperated with Coursera in 2013 and edX in 2014, providing Chinese subtitles for the two platforms. The content of 网易公 开课 (http://open.163.com/), a Chinese website of open courses that is affiliated with the NetEase company, is similar to OOPS. However, unlike OOPS or Coursera, the website does not have an integrated translation platform, and the sources of its subtitles are unclear and varied. As Zhao (2013) put it, the website finds its translators either from fansub groups or by recruiting people who love subtitling and translating part-time or full-time for reimbursement. The translators usually focus on translating one type of course according to their expertise. After uploading their translated subtitles, the staff of the website will proofread them, record any errors in a form and send it to the translators for revision. Besides, the subtitles of some courses are just borrowed from the existing resources, as on the website there is a line saying: “The translation of some courses is reproduced from the free subtitles published by YYeTs, TLF and other fansub groups. NetEase disseminates and retains all subtitle copyright information. We sincerely thank them for their contributions.”

It can be seen that fansub groups play an important part in the translation of MOOCs in China. Fansubbing is a sub-set of audio-visual translation (AVT). As the name suggests, fansubbing refers to subtitling videos by fans. The emergence of fansubbing in the 1980s is a result of the work of Japanese anime fans, who produced and distributed subtitles

through anime clubs (Leonard, 2005). In 2006, Díaz-Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez defined a fansub as “a fan-produced, translated, subtitled version of a Japanese anime programme” (p.37). Looking back now, this definition is rather restrictive. As time went by, fansubbing was no longer limited to Japanese anime. It can now refer to any foreign TV show or movie, or any video of a superstar, as long as they have fans who are willing to translate the subtitles. Fansubbing is also called ‘amateur subtitling’ (Lepre, 2015) or ‘non-professional subtitling’ (Orrego-Carmona, 2015), which implies that fans do not have to be professional translators or receive any translation training. Thanks to the great accessibility of many means of interacting online and sharing different cultures in the 21st century, fans from around the world can easily and conveniently engage in collaborative work related to their idols or admired products, which leads to the proliferation of fansubbing. The fansubbing process usually involves raw video providers, translators, timers, typesetters, editors, proof-readers and encoders (Díaz-Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez, 2006). Usually, each role is played by a different person, and each member only completes the assigned task, but sometimes the same person can play different roles.

As Qi (2019) has pointed out about MOOCs, fansubbing is also entangled in copyright issues. A number of researchers have written about the legal issues that involve the copyright of releasing the subbed audiovisual programs (González, 2007; Rembert-Lang, 2010; He, 2014; Hsiao, 2014; Lee, 2014; Cai, 2015; Wang, 2015; Wongseree, 2019). The very act of translating copyright material may also be a breach of Intellectual Property Law, even before translated materials are distributed. The legal issues in fansubbing are very complex, because the distribution of anime, TV shows and movies is done via the

Internet, “a medium in which borders and nationalities” are “difficult” to delineate (Díaz-Cintas and Sánchez, 2006, p.45). The lack of enforcement of copyright laws is also a thorny problem, as different stakeholders hold different attitudes towards copyright (ibid.).

In China, people rely heavily on subtitles, both intralingual and interlingual. According to the experience of the researcher, almost all news, movies and TV shows have Chinese subtitles. As for Chinese fansubbing, Cai (2015) elaborates on its history in her study. She mentions BitTorrent, a forum providing the largest downloading and uploading of audiovisual products for Chinese netizens. This forum gained popularity between 2003 and 2004, giving rise to the emergence of fansubs in China (Hu, 2009). For instance, in 2006, the American TV series Prison Break was a big hit in China. Meanwhile, a report on Chinese fansubbers by Howard W. French (2006) was published in The New York Times. Cai mentions that both of these facts accelerated the development of fansubbing in China. The large number of fansubbing subtitles on the Internet has also become a valuable resource that can be used for constituting various corpora for training MT systems. For example, the OpenSubtitle corpus is a collection of parallel translated movie subtitles from http://www.opensubtitles.org/, which includes lots of fansubbing subtitles in various languages. The corpus (ZH-EN) has been used for the frequency analysis of the machine translated subtitles in this PhD research, see Sections 2.3.1 and 8.3 for more information.