This essay is aimed to create a guide for the Catalan translation of the American reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race. The lack of LGBT references in the Catalan culture, specially those related to the drag theme, along with the absence of reality shows on the Catalan TV are the main reason of interest for the translation of this show. From this point, we analyse what kind of translation would be more appropriate for a TV show with a well-defined slang and containing multiple cultural references, both ...
This essay is aimed to create a guide for the Catalan translation of the American reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race. The lack of LGBT references in the Catalan culture, specially those related to the drag theme, along with the absence of reality shows on the Catalan TV are the main reason of interest for the translation of this show. From this point, we analyse what kind of translation would be more appropriate for a TV show with a well-defined slang and containing multiple cultural references, both American and LGBT-related. Based on examples from one episode of the series, among which we can find drag vocabulary, phraseology of the program, names of celebrities, titles for movies and other cultural references, translations are provided with their corresponding explanations. We can note that the option of translating with a foreignization tendency is preferable to naturalization or domestication due to the large number of references, the lack of a drag context in the target culture and the educational purpose of the show when revealing cultural referents related to American gay culture. In addition, the resulting product fits the constraints of half-dubbing, the preferred type of dubbing for reality shows in the target context, and also tries to keep the humorous effect of drag-queens’ slang, mostly based on abundant puns.
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