Love My House, Love My Bird An Intercultural Communication Perspective on Chinese Fansub Practices

ABSTRACT Using a netnography approach, this study examines Martial, a Chinese fansub group, as an online community of practice. It finds four identities to be exhibited by members of the group: language-, education-, mediation-, and business-related identities. In its work flow and division of labour, Martial pools the collective intelligence of its members to localize Western culture through various “domestication” translation strategies. As a result, this research extends our understanding of intercultural communication by offering an example of how contemporary online fansub groups speak for Western culture on the Chinese Internet.