Thank you Matt Groening

How The Simpsons Helped Rough Translation Get Born

When I was first pitching the Rough Translation podcast back in 2016 no one knew what I was talking about. Maybe I didn’t either. Was it a show about international news? Not exactly. Linguistics? Sometimes. I said we’d be “following conversations that are happening in the US into other parts of the world” which really only makes sense if you’ve heard the show, which at that point no one had.

Enter The Simpsons.

The Simpsons @TheSimpsons

#TheSimpsons #Simpsons #Ukraine

Let me explain. In 2014 I was in Ukraine for NPR at the start of the war with Russia. The US attitude to the war was completely different from how it is now. People would say: Isn’t Ukraine basically “part of” Russia? Don’t many of them speak Russian anyway? It didn’t help that a number of US outlets referenced an “Ethno-linguistic map” of Ukraine that basically made it look like the Balkans.

This map did not fit with the Ukraine that I knew. I had lived in Eastern Ukraine. (I spent a year learning accordion and teaching philosophy at Donetsk University, but that’s a story for another post.) Just because Eastern Ukrainians spoke Russian as their first language didn’t mean they were Russian. This map, or at least how it was being used to explain the conflict (two-peoples-in-one-country) was an over-simplification that played directly into Russian propaganda. (I’m aware that I’m writing this in 2023, when Ukraine is more often talked about by the West as a unified whole.)

Back then, it wasn’t so easy to interest US audiences in stories about Ukraine. Especially a counter-narrative story about Ukrainian language politics. Then I got a tip: The Ukrainian-dubbed version of The Simpsons was popular in Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine. In other words, wherever you found yourself on that ‘ethno-linguistic’ map, you would find people watching - and laughing at - Homer and Marge speaking Ukrainian.

What I love about this little NPR story is that it seems to be a story about something from our culture - The Simpsons - but it’s actually a story about Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian bilingualism. I would play this story in pitch meetings and explain that Rough Translation would perform the same trick: start with something you might be curious about, then lead you from there to something you didn’t know enough to be curious about — yet.

Sadly, as I write this now, Donetsk is still under Russian control, and Ukrainian bilingualism is different kind of casualty of this war. So for today’s clip from the audio archives, I wanted to highlight this short ode to “Surzhyk,” a ‘mixed’ language that mashes up Ukrainian and Russian (much like Spanglish or Sheng or Singlish). It’s also about the roots of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s roots in the post-soviet competitive comedy circuit. When I was back in Ukraine in 2019, I followed a comedy competition on this very Soviet-looking stage…

A comedy team rehearses at the Palace of Culture in Kramatorsk, Ukraine.

One of the teams in the competition was an all-women team from the capital, Kyiv. Their comedic use of Surzhyk cut close to the bone for the competition organizer, Enrique.

Hear the full episode here.

What are your favorite & fragile products of bilingualism? Tell me in the chat.