Beyond Subtitling and Dubbing: Localization, Cultural Positioning and Audience Engagement in the Transnational Circulation of Nigerian Streaming Media

Audiovisual translation scholarship on Nigerian streaming media has been organized almost entirely around a translation-accuracy paradigm, the question of whether a subtitle or dub correctly transfers a source utterance's meaning. That paradigm cannot explain a pattern visible across platform reviews, diaspora social media discussion, and the audiovisual translation reception literature itself: audiences routinely rate a localized text as good or bad on grounds that have little to do with lexical accuracy, whether a kinship term was rendered with the right register, whether a proverb was allowed to sound foreign or was smoothed into fluency, whether a platform bothered to localize a title's synopsis at all. This paper argues that these judgments are best understood as cultural positioning, acts through which a localized text and its surrounding paratext signal a stance toward Nigerian cultural material, respect, exoticization, assimilation, or erasure, and that positioning, not translation accuracy alone, is what predicts audience engagement, sustained viewing, diasporic identification, and community discussion. Synthesizing translation studies, cultural proximity theory, and platform-circulation research, the paper builds a four-layer positioning framework spanning textual, paratextual, platform, and community levels, and maps six Nollywood content categories, contemporary urban drama, comedy, faith-based film, historical epic, music-driven content, and docudrama, onto the positioning strategies each typically receives and the engagement risks that follow. The paper closes with five falsifiable propositions distinguishing positioning effects from comprehension effects. Its central claim is that a Nigerian title can be translated correctly and positioned badly, and that audience engagement research on Nigerian streaming media has measured the wrong variable for too long.