Given the recent changes and drastic developments in the level of public access to technology as well as cultural and creative products, translation has evolved and extended from an exclusively professional practice to also a use-generated activity. Although such non-professional translation widely suffers from fairly low translation quality and often barely conforms to the established standards, the phenomenon has received vast popularity among the audiences; it is understandably because that translation by users for users enjoys the advantage of addressing the immediate needs and wants of the users and is hardly slowed down or hindered by the formal and official regulations and professional challenges, as such translational activities dominantly run on affective and social motivations, and economic incentives are not involved. Fansub as the practice of inter-lingual translation of audiovisual material, such as animations, television series, films and documentaries is the most popular type of user-generated translation which is attracting the attention of many scholars who once dismissed the entire concept and unworthy of academic research as it was a professional product. Fansub has been investigated from various dimensions, ranging from quality, motivations, taboo and censorship, to activism and resistance. This paper discusses the role of Persian fansubs of French feature films as a means of appropriating and clarifying the French cultural identify for the Iranian audiences as opposed to the one created and sustained by the official films translated on the Iranian national television networks which formally aim at cultural gate keeping when broadcasting Persian dubbed foreign films by applying vast narrative, lingual and visual interventions. The study uses a sample of cases for exemplification.

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