Negotiating the Boundaries of Professional Subtitling: The Case of Finnish Subtitlers And Their Online Community

In recent years, the Finnish subtitling field has undergone significant changes, which have caused instability in subtitlersu0027 working conditions. Subtitlers have responded to these changes by working together towards a more unified community. The subtitlersu0027 community has traditionally been quite fragmented due to considerable variation in their working conditions, and the recent community-building efforts have attempted to overcome this fragmentation. One important means in these efforts has been an active online presence consisting of, among other things, a website and a blog.The subtitlersu0027 online presence could be characterised as an element of a professional (Tyulenev 2014: 68-69), an attempt to institutionalise the profession and to search for social recognition. One aspect of a project is to draw the boundaries of the profession and to determine criteria for acceptance into the community (Tyulenev 2014: 71). The definition of boundaries is a recurrent theme on the Finnish subtitlersu0027 website and blog. The subtitlersu0027 case therefore provides an enlightening example of how a heterogeneous field can attempt to improve its standing by negotiating its own boundaries.In this presentation, I will discuss how Finnish subtitlers determine the boundaries of their profession on their website and blog. I will examine how the argument for boundaries is constructed, what criteria the subtitlers present for inclusion in their community, and how exclusion from the community is expressed. I will suggest that a number of practices, such as adherence to local subtitling traditions, are used as a way of determining the behaviour of a subtitler. As a consequence, the definition of boundaries emerges as a central argument in the subtitlersu0027 project, becoming a strategy for unifying the subtitlersu0027 community and advocating for a more stable status.References Tyulenev, Sergey 2014. Translation and Society: An Introduction. London: Routledge.