Translation of the Drag Slang in RuPaul’s Drag Race

Abstract

“RuPaul’s Drag Race” introduces the audience to very specific discourse, which quickly became a subject for interdisciplinary research. Drag discourse is an artificial language characterized by a provocative and artistic way of speaking along with excessive usage of wordplay and neologisms, including very specific drag slang. Such discourse can be very difficult to interpret into another language, especially considering cultural expectations for language use. This paper focuses primarily on the translation of drag slang in the context of the mini-challenge “Reading is fundamental” using the corpus-based analysis and urban dictionaries to translate the terms from English to Russian. The first major finding of this paper is that the drag terms frequently have more than one definition. As a result, their pragmatic meaning varies in different contexts. It means that Russian translation must preserve the wordplay and the theatrical manner of speaking, thus emphasizing the artificial nature of drag discourse. Secondly, the show has a very specific audience, which consists mainly of the bilingual teenagers and young-adults with a sufficient background in drag performance. Such an audience allows to use transliteration in the final Russian version. Translation of the show into other languages would not only increase its popularity, but is also very likely to spread the concern of the LGBTQ community’s rights on the international level.