The Art of Subtitling: A case study of a Chinese online fansub group

Online fan subtitling (hereafter fansub) groups are a recent phenomenon that have quickly gained global popularity. They are groups of volunteers who produce and distribute subtitles of English televisions shows and films for free. However, to date not much academic attention has been paid to this phenomenon in a critical capacity, with the exception of anime fansubbing. This study closely examines one fansub group in China using a single-case design case study. The methods of data collection include: in-depth interviews with the translators; participant observation as a subtitle translator; and textual/discourse analysis of the subtitles. This study will use the British Cultural Study as its primary theoretical lens to explore the various ways in which the fansub group acts as resistance to the dominant discourse. By taking this approach, this paper hopes to expand the field of critical cultural studies by looking at the roles of the producers in mediating discourse, as well as fandom studies, by presenting a case of global fandom online

Do Money-based Incentives Improve User Effort and UGC Quality? Evidence from a Travel Blog Platform

Although user-generated content (UGC) is prevalent these days, high-quality UGC is still desired by readers and is crucial for the development of a website. Therefore, how to encourage users to produce high-quality content becomes a critical issue for UGC platforms. Using travel blogs collected from Lvmama.com, a leading online travel agency (OTA) in China, we investigated the effects of money-based incentives on user effort to generate high-quality content and its performance in the long run. The launch of money-based incentives after several years of running of the platform provides an ideal natural experiment setting. We applied the regression discontinuity design, and the results show that both user effort and UGC quality increased after the incentive program was released. However, the UGC quality declined quickly after that. This study concludes by presenting theoretical and managerial implications for both research and practice

Thermal effects on lattice strain in hcp Fe under pressure

We compute the c/a lattice strain versus temperature for nonmagnetic hcp iron at high pressures using both first-principles linear response quasiharmonic calculations based on the full potential linear-muffin-tin-orbital (LMTO) method and the particle-in-cell (PIC) model for the vibrational partition function using a tight-binding total-energy method. The tight-binding model shows excellent agreement with the all-electron LMTO method. When hcp structure is stable, the calculated geometric mean frequency and Helmholtz free energy of hcp Fe from PIC and linear response lattice dynamics agree very well, as does the axial ratio as a function of temperature and pressure. On-site anharmonicity proves to be small up to the melting temperature, and PIC gives a good estimate of its sign and magnitude. At low pressures, hcp Fe becomes dynamically unstable at large c/a ratios, and the PIC model might fail where the structure approaches lattice instability. The PIC approximation describes well the vibrational behavior away from the instability, and thus is a reasonable approach to compute high temperature properties of materials. Our results show significant differences from earlier PIC studies, which gave much larger axial ratio increases with increasing temperature, or reported large differences between PIC and lattice dynamics results.Comment: 9 figure