earticle

영어

This paper starts from questioning whether it is appropriate to describe a newly emerging group of user-translators as “non-professionals” just because they do not receive formal training in translation. Unlike traditional non-professional translators, these volunteer translators participating in translation of webtoons, free open-source softwares(FOSS), games, educational contents, news articles and subtitles for dramas, have domain knowledge and high level of digital proficiency. They work online in collaboration with other like-minded people with the help of computer aided translation tools and hold online discussion forums on translation related topics. In commercialized cases, quality control and evaluation are done through peer-reviews, voting, and revision by professionals. Through collaboration, discussions, usage of CAT tools and division of works, their lack of professional competence is compensated. With a dramatic increase in the volume of online contents which need linguistic mediation, these volunteers contribute a lot in helping people enjoy the cultural and intellectual contents over language barriers. Considering the strength of these translators characterized by strong interest, genre knowledge, online collaboration, digital literacy, and language proficiency, the term “non-professional” referring to these volunteer translators is not quite appropriate; and the traditional concept of professionalism in the translation community largely based on translation education needs to be reevaluated.