Streaming age: Fluidity of authorship and paratextual repackaging in media translation

The concept of paratext is useful when exploring the extent to which the ‘fringe’ of a text, such as titles and cover images, can be a ‘threshold of interpretation’(Genette 1997) that controls the text’s reception. Thus, paratext has been widely adopted in domains outside literary criticism and theory where it was first developed, including translation studies and media studies. Although its application to media text analysis in translation studies has been relatively rare, applying it to media translation (Batchelor 2018, 2020, 2022b, 2022a) and media text (Gray 2010, 2015, 2016, 2018; Brookey and Gray 2017) analyses could potentially provide considerable benefits. Adopting Gray’s understanding and application of paratexts to media texts, this study first critiques Genette’s dismissal of non-author-sanctioned paratexts in light of Gray’s argument on the temporality of authorship (Gray and Johnson 2013) in ‘participatory culture’(Jenkins and Deuze 2008) and ‘convergence culture’ (Jenkins 2012, 2018). The argument is then made that streaming platforms and the role played by translators further complicate the fluid nature of authorship in the digital era. Using a case study of the British film I, Daniel Blake, and its Korean translation available on a Korean streaming platform, this study discusses the wealth of other objects surrounding the media text, offered by different agents in the translation and promotion processes. Translation shifts identified in the comparative analysis of the English and Korean subtitles are examined; however, greater emphasis is placed on the manner and extent to which paratextual elements surrounding the Korean translation – including trailers, posters, promotional videos, and user-generated videos on YouTube – reconstruct the meanings and central discourse of the source text.