Translating the other: Communal TV watching of Korean TV drama

Our research is situated in the field of the pragmatics of fiction (Locher and Jucker 2017; Messerli 2017), and explores a website that makes Asian drama series and movies accessible to an international audience by means of fan generated subtitles in over 150 languages ( www.viki.com ; Dwyer 2012, 2017). The streaming site offers a social network and participatory element in that it provides viewers with different possibilities of participation. Next to producing subtitles in teams, members can comment on episodes and actors, rate shows, produce their own videos, write to each other, etc. This paper explores the possibility of viewers commenting on the episode while it is being watched as a dynamic form of active reception. These comments are time-aligned with the video, which acts as the pivot of the interaction. Viewers can read other fans' comments, and can contribute their own comments and thus their own voice to this additional communal layer of drama series reception. Despite the fact that viewers typically view episodes and read/write comments asynchronously, a simultaneous viewing experience among an international community is created. We present a case study of the viewing of the first episode of two series and show how the commentators negotiate a number of issues, which include expectations about genre, character development, intertextuality and culture. We demonstrate that engaging with the video through written comments, engaging with each other in these comments and participating cross-linguistically are highly interactive, pragmatic achievements between different modes of communication of which the video itself is the starting point. Crucially, the timed comments also contribute to translating and making sense of the cultural 'other' as rendered in the videos. This is particularly the case in the comments on culture triggered by the video but also transpires in dialogues between the members.