The working of affect and emotion around the retranslation and (pre-)reception of Barbie on social media

Abstract This study focuses on the retranslation process and (pre-)reception of the film Barbie (2023) on two Chinese social media platforms, Red and WeChat, through the lens of affect. The retranslation in Chinese was self-commissioned, disseminated, and promoted by 秃炮怪 Tū Pào Guài (TPG), a subtitling collective lauded for their female-friendly and feminist stance by the mostly female audience. Informed by a relational understanding of affect, this study theorizes affect as latent potentialities and catalytic forces that shape encounters. To this end, the study traces online encounters by examining related posts and audience comments on both Red and WeChat regarding Barbie ’s retranslation and (pre-)reception. The findings suggest that TPG’s retranslation, embedded in the collective’s affective labor, intersected with audience emotion work. This intersection manifested as audiences actively acknowledged TPG’s translatorial efforts through both verbal cues and less- or non-verbal expressions of appreciation. While TPG’s strategic stance-taking, presentation, and promotion of their retranslation facilitated an indisputably positive pre-reception, some dissonance did emerge, prompting TPG to regulate audience responses to maintain their engagement. This study demonstrates how affect can be methodologically applied in TS, showing its operationalization and theoretical explanatory power. By foregrounding the role of affect, this research advances the understanding of feminist cybersubtitling as a social practice, revealing such subtitling as a site of affective and digital labor that is intricately shaped by the affective architectures of social media.