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Cultural Transduction: Uribe-Jongbloed’s framework to understand media transnationalisation

In the recently published book “The travels of Media and Cultural Products: Cultural Transduction” (Routledge 2024), Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed provides a framework based on four tenets we can use to comprehend the way in which media products make their way from one cultural market to another.

Figure 1: Book cover

The book builds upon the ten years of research since the author first coined the concept of Cultural Transduction to address the processes behind the international trade of television formats. Although the original examples of the phenomenon were TV shows and films, the book provides further cases from video games to webtoons, in order to show how many of these exchanges can be better understood by looking at the four main aspects classified as tenets: the market; the product; the people; and the process.

Cultural Transduction draws from previous discussions in the political economy of media which disputed one-way media dependency scenarios and provided evidence from Latin America showing flows of content between culturally similar markets. Extending the concept of cultural proximity developed by Joseph Straubhaar since the 1990s, Uribe-Jongbloed presents the aspects, cultural or otherwise, that need to be studied to comprehend the barriers, challenges, and limitations of gaining access to the new markets into which a product travels. Then, he moves on to describe the characteristics that may be present in a cultural product which favour its inception elsewhere. He draws on the work of Ulrike Rohn to understand the types of universals and lacunae in content and delivery that might help or hinder a product’s chances of travelling cross-culturally. From the product tenet he goes over to the people tenet, focused on the individuals whose task it is to select, trade, and insert these products, as well as pointing out the conventions and events where they gather to appraise their potential. Finaly, under the process tenet, he explores the traditional forms of product acquisition and deployment, describing them as the hybridisation practices of media corporations in contrast to the convergent practices of fans and followers. These are presented as the two main ways products find a way into new markets and a more recent addition in the form of Transduction Labs is highlighted: institutions devoted almost exclusively to these procedures, including video game localisation companies.

The book provides several examples, from the success of the Colombian telenovela Yo Soy Betty, la Fea (1999-2000) as a scripted format sold the world over, to the strategies developed by video game creators Ironhide Games from Montevideo, Uruguay, which included negotiations with partners in China to develop and promote the character of Guiying for their hit game Iron Marines (see figure 2).

Figure 2: Hero profile image of Guiying.

The book manages to bring together theoretical perspectives from the fields of media, cultural, translation and adaptation studies, to organise a diverse set of concepts into a coherent framework. It thus lends itself to a variety of applications from both an analytic and prospective perspective. It is written in accessible language and, at just over 100 pages, gets straight to the point. Overall, a fascinating read for those interested in the transnationalisation of media products.

Marian Orjuela, MsC. 

Doctoral researcher | HCIAS Publications and Knowledge Transfer Coordinator


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Marian Orjuela (February 1, 2024). Cultural Transduction: Uribe-Jongbloed’s framework to understand media transnationalisation. HCIAS Blog. Retrieved April 21, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/vqkg


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