From Lyrics to Legibility: Translation, Vernacular Metadata, and Transnational Music Publics in East Asian and Sinophone Platform Ecologies
Main Article Content
Authors
University of Hong Kong
Abstract
Cross-linguistic music circulation on digital platforms depends not only on recordings but also on translated titles, lyric subtitles, Romanization, captions, hashtags, playlist labels, sound pages, and comment-based explanation. This article examines how these practices organize musical legibility within East Asian and Sinophone-centered platform ecologies. It develops the concept of translated sonic publics to describe interpretive communities that arise when sonic fragments become searchable, emotionally intelligible, reusable, and socially addressable through translation and vernacular metadata. The study uses an interview-led qualitative comparative design based on twelve semi-structured interviews with fan translators/subtitlers, short-video creators, transnational listeners, and playlist/community curators, together with participant-elicited platform cases. Three findings emerge. Translation creates affective entry points while producing tensions between immediacy and cultural specificity; vernacular metadata functions as an infrastructure of searchability and cross-platform movement while compressing genre and place; and publics form through mediated intimacy, learning, and misrecognition. The article contributes a regionally grounded model that differentiates translated sonic publics from networked, affective, and fan publics by foregrounding the joint operation of sonic form, cross-language mediation, platform legibility, and partial understanding.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright remains with the author(s). All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). This license permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided that appropriate credit is given to the original author(s) and the source, a link to the license is provided, and any changes are indicated.
How to Cite
References
Abidin, Crystal. 2021. “Mapping Internet Celebrity on TikTok: Exploring Attention Economies and Visibility Labours.” Cultural Science Journal 12 (1): 77–103. https://doi.org/10.5334/csci.140
Ananny, Mike, and Kate Crawford. 2018. “Seeing without Knowing: Limitations of the Transparency Ideal and Its Application to Algorithmic Accountability.” New Media & Society 20 (3): 973–989. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816676645
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Baym, Nancy K. 2018. Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection. New York: New York University Press.
Beer, David. 2017. “The Social Power of Algorithms.” Information, Communication & Society 20 (1): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1216147
Bonini, Tiziano, and Alessandro Gandini. 2019. “‘First Week Is Editorial, Second Week Is Algorithmic’: Platform Gatekeepers and the Platformization of Music Curation.” Social Media + Society 5 (4): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880006
Born, Georgina. 2011. “Music and the Materialization of Identities.” Journal of Material Culture 16 (4): 376–388. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183511424196
Born, Georgina, and David Hesmondhalgh, eds. 2000. Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music. Berkeley: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520923799
boyd, danah. 2010. “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications.” In A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, edited by Zizi Papacharissi, 39–58. New York: Routledge.
Bucher, Taina. 2018. If...Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190493028.001.0001
Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green. 2018. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity.
Cheney-Lippold, John. 2017. We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves. New York: New York University Press.
Couldry, Nick, and Andreas Hepp. 2017. The Mediated Construction of Reality. Cambridge: Polity.
Couldry, Nick, and Ulises A. Mejias. 2019. The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Desblache, Lucile. 2019. Music and Translation: New Mediations in the Digital Age. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54965-5
Díaz Cintas, Jorge, and Pablo Muñoz Sánchez. 2006. “Fansubs: Audiovisual Translation in an Amateur Environment.” The Journal of Specialised Translation 6: 37–52. https://www.jostrans.org/issue06/art_diaz_munoz.php
Eriksson, Maria, Rasmus Fleischer, Anna Johansson, Pelle Snickars, and Patrick Vonderau. 2019. Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10932.001.0001
Feld, Steven. 2001. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.” In Globalization, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 189–216. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822383215-011
Franzon, Johan. 2008. “Choices in Song Translation: Singability in Print, Subtitles and Sung Performance.” The Translator 14 (2): 373–399. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2008.10799263
Freeman, Sophie, Martin Gibbs, and Bjørn Nansen. 2023. “Personalised but Impersonal: Listeners’ Experiences of Algorithmic Curation on Music Streaming Services.” In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, article 412, 1–14. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581492
Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gillespie, Tarleton. 2014. “The Relevance of Algorithms.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot, 167–194. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262525374.003.0009
Hall, Stuart. 1997. “The Work of Representation.” In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall, 13–74. London: Sage.
Hesmondhalgh, David. 2013. Why Music Matters. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.
Hesmondhalgh, David, Raquel Campos Valverde, D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, and Zhongwei Li. 2023. The Impact of Algorithmically Driven Recommendation Systems on Music Consumption and Production: A Literature Review. UK Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation. https://ssrn.com/abstract=4365916
Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
Kaindl, Klaus. 2005. “The Plurisemiotics of Pop Song Translation: Words, Music, Voice and Image.” In Song and Significance: Virtues and Vices of Vocal Translation, edited by Dinda L. Gorlée, 235–262. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Kaye, D. Bondy Valdovinos, Xu Chen, and Jing Zeng. 2021. “The Co-Evolution of Two Chinese Mobile Short Video Apps: Parallel Platformization of Douyin and TikTok.” Mobile Media & Communication 9 (2): 229–253. https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157920952120
Lee, Hye-Kyung. 2011. “Participatory Media Fandom: A Case Study of Anime Fansubbing.” Media, Culture & Society 33 (8): 1131–1147. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443711418271
Low, Peter. 2005. “The Pentathlon Approach to Translating Songs.” In Song and Significance: Virtues and Vices of Vocal Translation, edited by Dinda L. Gorlée, 185–212. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Meintjes, Louise. 1990. “Paul Simon’s Graceland, South Africa, and the Mediation of Musical Meaning.” Ethnomusicology 34 (1): 37–73. https://doi.org/10.2307/852356
Minors, Helen Julia, ed. 2013. Music, Text and Translation. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Morris, Jeremy Wade, and Devon Powers. 2015. “Control, Curation and Musical Experience in Streaming Music Services.” Creative Industries Journal 8 (2): 106–122. https://doi.org/10.1080/17510694.2015.1090222
Nieborg, David B., and Thomas Poell. 2018. “The Platformization of Cultural Production: Theorizing the Contingent Cultural Commodity.” New Media & Society 20 (11): 4275–4292. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694
Papacharissi, Zizi. 2015. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pérez-González, Luis. 2014. Audiovisual Translation: Theories, Methods and Issues. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315762975
Poell, Thomas, David B. Nieborg, and Brooke Erin Duffy. 2022. Platforms and Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity.
Poell, Thomas, David Nieborg, and José van Dijck. 2019. “Platformisation.” Internet Policy Review 8 (4): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1425
Prey, Robert. 2018. “Nothing Personal: Algorithmic Individuation on Music Streaming Platforms.” Media, Culture & Society 40 (7): 1086–1100. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717745147
Prey, Robert. 2020. “Locating Power in Platformization: Music Streaming Playlists and Curatorial Power.” Social Media + Society 6 (2): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120933291
Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity.
Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822395522
Striphas, Ted. 2015. “Algorithmic Culture.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 18 (4–5): 395–412. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549415577392
Taylor, Timothy D. 2007. Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822389972
van Dijck, José, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal. 2018. The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190889760.001.0001
Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.
Webster, James G. 2014. The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Article Sidebar
Download
The empirical materials for this article include anonymized semi-structured interview data, public-facing platform artefacts, analytic memos, and coding materials. Because the interview data contain potentially identifiable contextual information, the full transcripts are not publicly deposited in order to protect participant confidentiality. The manuscript reports only anonymized excerpts using participant codes, and all platform handles, private identifiers, and personally identifying details have been removed. The participant matrix, coding framework, and interview guide are included in the manuscript and appendix to support methodological transparency. Further non-identifying methodological information may be made available by the author upon reasonable request, where this does not compromise participant anonymity or research ethics.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.