Massidda, Serenella. 2025. Audiovisual Translation and Audience Participation in the Digital Age. In Lu, S., Lu, S., & Liang, L. (Eds.). Danmu-mediated Communication and Audiovisual Translation in the Digital Age (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003475422

In the last decade, the media localisation industry has observed a shift in the way audiovisual content is localised and consumed by multifaceted audiences. New global viewers plugged into streaming platforms can decide when and how to watch the content available, taking the driver’s seat in a process that had never been in their hands until now. Due to a series of technological and mediatic revolutions in the media industry, media participation has also evolved in the last few years. Audience participation in the digital age, popularised by danmu, a form of online commenting system, has proliferated enormously in the last few years thanks to the rise of subtitling. The danmu phenomenon mainly trends in East Asian countries but in China has boomed and become a default feature in video websites. Its peculiarity is the lack of an orderly fashion in the way content is delivered, floating horizontally through the video and covering the audiovisual content which reflecting the naturalness of oral speech. This chapter outlines how the latest trends in audiovisual translation (AVT) have shaped today’s media participation in the digital age.