Methodological concerns in online translation community research: a reflexive netnography on translator's communal habitus

This article attempts to integrate Kozinets’ netnography and Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology as a promising methodology to study the communal habitus of online translation community Fixsub. We closely examine the methodological issues encountered and orientates to address the three interrelated questions: How should a researcher posit his/her scholarly position in an online translation community? How is a researcher–participant relationship built within the virtual settings? How does a researcher balance the traditional dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity during his/her online participation? We conclude that an online translation community research requires the researcher to have an ongoing immersion within the fieldsite, as well as in a state of participant objectivation to assess his/her own positionality in relation to the object of research and negotiate the mutual shaping between a participant and researcher