From amateur subtitling to bricolage: reconstructing an assemblage narrative – a case study of Taiwan bloggers’ bricolage practices

Bricolage is the process of reconstructing and reusing artefacts, actions, ideas, symbols and styles to create new insights, allowing researchers to examine how actants shape cultural identities or reconstruct narrative meanings in new contexts. By expanding the conceptual scope of self-mediation, this study explores the fluctuating role of amateur subtitlers as bricoleurs in reconstructing a bricolage narrative. This study explores how amateur subtitlers B.C. & Lowy use digital tools on their blog and its associated distribution platforms to not only create subtitles for selected media but also expand their role by selecting, remixing, appropriating and reinterpreting various online media components to construct new meanings around the primary subtitled works. Through an analysis of their Meta and YouTube platforms, this study also examines how these subtitlers extend the act of bricolage to their audiences, encouraging interpretive engagement beyond the central story points. This study shows how bricolage offers a useful lens for understanding amateur subtitling as an act of recalibration , adjustment and mashup, shaping a narrative assemblage that reflects hybridity in meaning (re)making and discursive engagement.