Analysis of RuPaul’s Drag Race in Türkiye from a Translation Studies Perspective
Özet
Queer translation has been a significant research area within Translation Studies. The increasing presence of queer content on streaming services like Netflix highlights the importance of subtitling in conveying queer discourse. This study firstly aims to examine the micro- and macro-translation strategies employed in the Turkish subtitles of the American reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) and its spin-offs available on Netflix, with a particular focus on the transmission of drag language. RPDR heavily utilises drag language, which, as an anti-language of the drag queen sub-culture, is rich in queer elements and deserves attention due to the challenges it poses for subtitling. The second goal of this study is to explore how and to what extent the translational decisions in the Turkish subtitles capture the queer essence of drag language. The three key concepts that guide the study are performativity, identity, and discourse. The micro-analysis employs Jan Pedersen’s (2011) Extralinguistic Cultural Reference transfer taxonomy adapted to examine Intralinguistic Cultural References under four categories, namely (i) the word ‘drag’ and its derivatives, (ii) gender-specific expressions, (iii) ballroom culture, and (iv) miscellaneous. The macro-analysis employs Marc Démont’s (2018) queer translation strategies, initially formulated for literary texts, for the subtitling examples in this thesis. The study reveals that certain instances, classified as misrecognizing or minoritizing translation in the analysis, cannot be definitively characterised as such, as they are supported by visual elements that facilitate a process of queering translation. The study concludes that the Turkish subtitles predominantly reflect the queer nature of the show and that the utilization of micro- and macro-translation strategies can be markedly influenced by the limitations imposed by the subtitling process. The analysis of the strategies also reveals that the translator(s) adopt an activist approach in introducing Western queer terms into another culture.
