“Reinas unidas, jamás serán vencidas”. Characterisation of drag queens in the Spanish voice-over of RuPaul’s "Drag race"

RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009 - present) is an American reality television programme launched by RuPaul Charles – arguably the most popular drag queen today – which has transformed drag queens from subcultural, into a mainstream phenomenon. After briefly analysing the controversial concept of drag queens in light of Judith Butler’s performative turn, as well as drag language following Keith Harvey’s framework for identifying camp talk, this research aims at investigating the European-Spanish voice-over – the “ugly duckling” of Audiovisual Translation Studies (Orero, 2006) – of RuPaul’s Drag Race Seasons 8 (2016), 9 (2017) and 10 (2018). For historical reasons, drag culture and language are particularly rooted in the USA, whereas Spain has a shorter drag tradition, creating a significant amount of problems for translators. This work seeks primarily to analyse the choices that are made in translation to mark drag language and to linguistically 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 (2016) 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.