“Reinas unidas jamás serán vencidas”: Drag queens in the Iberian Spanish voice-over of RuPaul’s Drag Race

Davide Passa

doi:10.24310/TRANS.2021.v1i25.11450

Authors

Davide Passa Sapienza Università di Roma Italy https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3327-2101

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24310/TRANS.2021.v1i25.11450

Keywords:

RuPaul’s Drag Race, voice-over, Queer Linguistics, camp talk, (Queer) Audiovisual Translation Studies, drag queens

Abstract

RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009 – present) is an American reality television programme launched by RuPaul Charles, which has turned drag queens into a mainstream phenomenon. After briefly analysing the controversial figure of the drag queen in the light of Judith Butler’s performative turn, as well as drag lingo following Keith Harvey’s framework for identifying camp talk, this research aims at investigating the European Spanish voice-over of Seasons 8 (2016), 9 (2017) and 10 (2018). This work seeks primarily to analyse the choices that are made in the target text to characterise drag queens in the localised European Spanish version available on Netflix. The translation procedures mentioned in this study are partly adapted from Ranzato’s (2015) classification for culture-specific references. The analysis focuses mainly on the creative rendering of (semi-)homophony, drag terms, references to pop culture and grammatical gender.

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