In recent years, a growing body of scholarship has begun to explore the interventionist subtitling practices that the engagement of amateur translators (mainly affiliated to certain strands of media fandom) with the global flow of digital audiovisual commodities has brought about. But against a background characterised by constant technological developments, the proliferation of social networking platforms and the increasing availability of tools for the manipulation and dissemination of audiovisual products, subtitling is now also being increasingly appropriated by mediators pursuing political agendas. In this context, subtitling – and, more widely, translation – is fast becoming a trope through which activists can subvert the conventions and discursive practices of mainstream cultural industries and justify their adoption of alternative mediating paradigms.
The first part of this presentation outlines the theoretical framework underpinning this study of activist subtitling – which draws mainly on the conceptual apparatus of media sociology – and reports on the main objectives of this work in progress:
• achieving a better understanding of subtitling as a means of political resistance against institutional, assimilationist representational practices in the mass communication industry;
• establishing how subtitling contributes to the formation of activist subjectivity;
• assessing the role that transgressive subtitling plays in the increasingly disjunctive process of cultural reception - specifically by strengthening the fragmentation of target audiences into political micro-constituencies.
The second part of the presentation focuses on the methodological difficulties that the analyst encounters when attempting to compile and interrogate this type of data. Two versions of a news interview – subtitled by amateur activists and posted on their respective blogs – are used to illustrate my approach to the analysis of activist subtitling and to systematise the most salient features of this form of mediation.

Luis PÉREZ-GONZÁLEZ is a senior lecturer in Translation Studies at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester, where he teaches screen translation, translation theory and interpreting. He has published in the fields of audiovisual translation, systemic functional linguistics and forensic linguistics and supervises doctoral research in the fields of audiovisual translation, multimodal communication and interpreting studies. He is features editor of The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, an international refereed by St Jerome and is currently guest editing a special issue of the Journal of Language and Politics (John Benjamins) on Translation and the Genealogy of Conflict. A freelance translator for international organisations since 1995, he has recently acted as a consultant for the European Agency for Reconstruction in the development of translation and interpreter training programmes and translation certification mechanisms in Eastern Europe.