Masjanja is a modern Russian cartoon made with Macromedia Flash animation. It was created in autumn 2001 by Oleg Kuvaev. Masjanja’s popularity has rapidly grown since then. In Russia, it is almost legendary and it has made the move from the Internet to television (although its popularity is mainly supported by the Internet). A typical Masjanja episode is only a few minutes long and consists mainly of sarcastic (and frequently absurd) commentary on contemporary Russian life.
This paper will analyse the significance of Masjanja in Russian contemporary culture (as a ‘generational’ phenomenon, with its youth slang, etc.). Some episodes, phrases, and dialogues from Masjanja will be paraphrased and commented on, and the paper will demonstrate how difficult it is to understand the Russian context and subtext when transferring the cartoon into a different language and culture (via subtitling or dubbing). In the process of translation the youth slang and all the marked substandard linguistic factors should be maintained rather than neutralised. The AV translator must render the picturesque quality of the source text in the target language to achieve a similar effect on the target viewer.
There have been several attempts to subtitle Masjanja from Russian into English, mostly amateurish, made by fans, who then uploaded on YouTube the results of their fansubbing experiments. A new attempt to translate some episodes of Masjanja is now in progress. Oleg Kuvaev himself has also tried to dub Masjanja. Translators have been urgently requested to keep strikingly expressive slang elements of the original in the transfer into the English language. Kuvaev has then uploaded dubbed episodes on the net, through social networks, blog platforms and Flash portals in order to get some feedback on the product from the Internet users themselves, that is, the main audience of Masjanja. For this reason, the translation of Masjanja is a kind of work in progress that improves day by day through the participation of a growing number of people from simple YouTube users and fansubbers to translators and scholars interested in AVT. Does this mean that a kind of practice of ‘participating AVT’ online is taking shape?
This paper will show the results of some attempts at subtitling and dubbing Masjanja, starting from the episode Pizza and will also consider some proposals for improvement. I hope there will also be proposals for improvement from the audience members themselves.

Eleonora GALLUCCI graduated in Foreign Languages in 1994 at the University of Salerno (Italy), with a dissertation in Slavic Philology. She obtained her PhD in Slavistics at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” (1995-1999). She worked as a research assistant in Slavistics in Rome, La Sapienza (2001-03), and did a post-doc in Slavistics in Salerno (2003-04). She spent several periods abroad (1993-2001) at the University of Veliko Tarnovo and Sofia (Bulgaria), Brno (Czech Republic), in Moscow, at the State University for Human Sciences (RGGU) and at the Institute for Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since 1 January 2005 Eleonora Gallucci has been working as a lecturer and a research fellow at the University of Salento (Lecce, Italy). She is a member of AIS (Association of Italian Slavists), and a member of the editorial board of eSamizdat (www.esamizdat.it). At present her favourite research fields are AVT translation, new media and internet studies (Russian cyberspace, the language of Runet and Russian blogosphere), CMC and SLA. She is teaching Russian as a foreign language, consecutive interpretation Russian-Italian-Russian, and multi-medial translation Russian-Italian-Russian. In the past she also taught Slavic Philology (Old Church Slavonic) and Italian as a foreign language (to Russian students)