This study aims to investigate the field of voluntary song translation in the era of algorithms through a case study  on a website where song translations are shared. The objective is to explore the multiple roles of the human translator in fan translation of lyrics and the “human added value” (Massey, 2021) beyond lexical transfer in the translation process in this field.  Thus, the study intends to contribute to the translation/translator studies by trying to find out why human agency is still relevant and important in this type of translation which appears to be an understudied subject in the field. The website that was chosen for analysis is Lyrics Translate which boasts the world’s greatest stock of translations of lyrics between many different language pairs and which claims its repertoire to be consisting of only human translations. With artificial intelligence and LLM surge in the recent years, the need for and the roles of human translators may be questioned. This study projects to shed some light on these questions through paratextual analysis of the comments of the fan translators in this digital community. The first part of the study includes the most active ten translators of the year according to the translator’s leaderboard of the website carrying out translations involving Turkish as the source or target language. Their discourse around translations during the first seven months of 2026 and the notes they added to the their last fifty translations were used as the corpus of analysis. In the second part of the study, discussions that involved machine/AI translation in the forum since 2024 by translators from various language pairs were analyzed  to understand the translators’ and website’s perspectives towards these practices. The preliminary results show that the translators in the field  are not only active in translating songs but also in helping/criticizing translations of others, explaining cultural phenomena, and describing their motives for and significance of human translation. The results are also suggestive of the possibility of a collaboration against machine/AI translation threat in volunteer translation, which itself has been seen as a threat to professional translators by some.

Keywords: translation of lyrics, songs, paratexts, voluntary translation, translator studies