Friday nights in Romania under the communist regime (which came to an end in December 1989), friends and family would gather in front of their television sets trying to guess what they were actually watching. Telephone calls would be made, film reference and theory books consulted. Such detective skills were required due to the government's censorship tactics which included screening foreign films (both on television and in cinemas) with their titles altered beyond recognition, credit sequences removed, entire scenes eliminated and dialogue ideologically “cleansed” through the subtitling process. Coauthor and Romanian national Ioana Uricaru recalls that “God” was invariably translated as Cel-de-Sus or “the one above” and “church” as edificiu or “edifice.” Sometimes films playing in cinemas would differ dramatically at the beginning and end of their run, as elements requiring excision came to the attention of officials.

Subtitling was the translation method associated with government media channels. As such, it was considered official, professional, and proper – both “ideologically correct” and the industry standard. With subtitles, interference of the “original” is kept at a minimum. As lines of text superimposed onto the film image, subtitles neither erase nor noisily intrude upon the foreign soundtrack. Consequently, they are often viewed as a clean technique that respects the source material by enabling it to remain intact. However, in Romania, the identification of subtitling with “quality” translation was compromised by its close link to adjacent practices of content deletion and paraphrasing for the sake of ideological alteration. The role that subtitling played in making meaning palatable for the “party line” meant that this technique was, concurrently, subject to suspicion and distrust, especially by those (extremely numerous) audience members who understood foreign languages and were able to fact-check official versions.

In the following discussion, we note how translation can function both in the service and subversion of censorship, and how both roles are complicated by contradictory notions of quality and authenticity. We begin by pitting Romania's official, government-sanctioned translation methods against the unofficial, amateur, and alternative practices that typify piracy operations. We then proceed to unpack and expand notions of media piracy to include niche, expert, and online modes of engagement.