Fansubbing constitutes one of the most significant developments to occur within screen translation to date. An amateur form of subtitling done by fans rather than professionals, today fansubbing is predominantly digital and online, utilising vast, geographically dispersed networks to pull off subtitling feats with phenomenally fast turnaround times. Italian fansubbing group ItaSA (Italian Subs Addicted), for instance, provides access to US TV shows like The Big Bang Theory (CBS, 2007–) and Modern Family (ABC, 2009–) within hours of US airings (Barra 2009: 517–18; Vellar 2011: 6–7). By taking translation into their own hands, fans revalue this vital mediating tool, reversing the usual tendency within screen culture to either ignore or denounce its operations. Instead of approaching translation as unwanted interference, fansubbers respond proactively towards perceived failings, transforming limitations into possibilities and proposing a course of creative reinvention. Through graphic and textual play (which might include unusual fonts or layout, karaoke-style animated subtitles and the inclusion of foreign honorifics), as well as interventionist translator notes and collaborative, technologically savvy working protocols, the fansubbing phenomenon is exploding standard screen translation practices, exposing supposed rules and formal constraints as mere conventions. This celebration of the subtitle's liberation from the chains of normative use is driven from the bottom up, from everyday viewers without formal training, who often flout copyright in order to labour at the mammoth task of translation for no financial remuneration.

In this chapter, I investigate fansubbing as an errant or improper form of AVT that is currently reconfiguring the paradigms and politics of the screen and translation industries. Fansubbing can be identified as errant on the basis that it constitutes a subset of non-professional translating and interpreting. Fansubbers are generally untrained and voluntary. In this way, they are positioned at a remove from the ‘ongoing professionalization’ (Olohan 2012: 194) of the translation and interpreting industries, and consequently are not bound by industry or institutional modes of regulation and rationalisation. Simply by dint of its non-professional status, I propose, fansubbing is defined as ‘improper’. At the same time, however, the errancy of fansubbing exceeds this definitional parameter, also manifesting in more explicit, intentional forms of disobedience and irregularity.