“A lot could be forgiven if you were funny”: A case study of the Spanish subtitling of queer humour in RuPaul’s Drag Race
Toulemonde, Daniela
Toulemonde, Daniela
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Publication Date
2025-07-04
Type
master thesis
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Abstract
This thesis investigates how humorous utterances in the US reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) are transformed in its official Spanish subtitles in streaming platforms. RPDR, which features a cast of drag queens each season, aired for the first time in 2009. It gained international success, which spread an American version of drag culture and its corresponding ideas about gender and sexuality. It is through the study of translations where the exchange of these ideas takes place that the power dynamics and the cultural negotiation involved can be revealed. The thesis focuses on the subtitles of humour because, in drag culture, linguistic creativity is considered essential for belonging to the community, and it is notoriously difficult to translate given the range of source culture-specific references and style.
The first part of the thesis discusses the existing theories and approaches in translation studies regarding audiovisual translation, subtitling, translation of humour, and queer translation. This overview establishes an appropriate methodology for analysing the subtitling of humour in RPDR by creating a list of priorities to be used for comparison with the translations. The second part is a detailed analysis of subtitles of humorous instances in RPDR into Spanish available on the streaming services Netflix and WoWPresentsPlus. This analysis focuses first on the subtitling of humorous cultural references and then on the subtitling of vulgar and taboo-based humour and sexually explicit humour. The analysis shows that the existing subtitles present a significant loss of humour when translating references, with some exception and they have a tendency towards attenuation of vulgarity, obscenity and sexually explicit humour.
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Publisher
University of Galway
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International