Description
Many participated in translation in its various forms without monetary payment, and many more will do so in the future regardless of the ups and downs of professionalisation, industrialisation, institutionalisation, or automation of translation. Why do they participate in translation if not for money then? Many scholars have attempted to answer this question. However, their answers are either limited to empirical findings or theoretically incomprehensive. To address this problem, this paper proposes an explanatory framework called Self-Determined Participation (SDP). It integrates Ryan and Deci’s (2021) Self-Determination Theory with Peters’ (2015) Four Kinds of Explanations for Human Deeds. By considering both social and psychological factors, this framework provides a socio-cognitive approach to explaining unpaid human participation in translation.Specifically, SDP illustrates a human participatory phenomenon that is originally energised by the assumed innate inclination in people to maintain healthy psychological growth (Ryan and Deci’s 2021). Such an inclination drives people to satisfy three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness (ibid.). To satisfy the three basic psychological needs, people set out to achieve aspirations through initiation or repetition of certain behaviours. Aspirations and behaviours are relatively general. Behaviours that achieve aspirations can be specified into actions that attain specific goals (Peters 2015). Ideally, people take various actions to attain goals, which continually contributes to behaviour-aspiration achievements and eventually to satisfactions of the three basic psychological needs. However, not all action-goals are supported in a specific context even when they contribute to people’s maintenance of psychological well-being. When contextual norms support an action-goal (attainment), the goal is a normative goal of the action that attains it, but may not be the real reason why the action has been set off. However, when contextual norms do not support an action-goal (attainment), people may still try to attain the nonnormative goal through a nonnormative action, where the goal is a nonnormative operative goal, a ‘motive’, for their action that attains it (Peters 2015). For actions that are evidently against social norms, the motive is more explanatory than normative action-goals.
Empirical findings about why people participate in translation without remuneration typically include participants’ feelings, relatively general behaviour-aspirations, and relatively specific action-goals. These action-goals usually do not conform to contextual norms of the participation in question, such as translating locally banned content, subtitling without authorisation, and interpreting in a way that breaks professional codes of conduct. These empirical findings can be coherently stratified and accounted for by SDP.
In this presentation, I will demonstrate how to apply SDP by using empirical findings from a 12-month ethnographic study on a Chinese queer subtitling community (Huang 2024). The ethnographic approach allowed the researcher to be in the community members’ authentic settings, use various means such as a survey, interviews, and digital archiving to collect detailed data about them, and embody their own understandings of why they participated in the community. The study also had rigorous ethical measures in place to protect the participants (Huang, Cadwell, and Sasamoto 2023). Therefore, it is a reliable and suitable source of examples.
| Period | 3 Jun 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | The fifth International Conference on Translation, Interpreting, and Cognition |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | NorwayShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |