L'articolo è parte del progetto “Traduzione audiovisiva partecipativa – Masjanja sbarca in Italia”, un progetto di AVT (Audiovisual Translation) incentrato sulla sottotitolazione in italiano di un'animazione Flash russa: Masjanja, cartoon creato dall'autore pietroburghese Oleg Kuvaev nel 2002. Si tratta di un esperimento che si fonda sui concetti chiave di cultura partecipativa (Jenkins 2006) e crowdsourcing (Howe 2008), evolvendo di giorno in giorno attraverso la partecipazione di un crescente numero di persone, da semplici utenti di YouTube o del Live Journal russo (la piattaforma blog più diffusa in Russia: RLJ, Russian Live Journal) e fansubber a traduttori e studiosi di traduzione audiovisiva. In questo articolo, in particolare, sono presentati alcuni esempi selezionati tratti dall'episodio "Pizza! Pizza!".

Masjanja, created in 2001 by Oleg Kuvaev, is certainly the most famous Flash Animation cartoon ever produced in Russia. In 2009, Masjanja became an object of study in a Master's Degree course in Translation at the University of Salento (Italy), with the creation of a “Participatory Audiovisual Translation” project. The aim of this project was to bring this cartoon to the attention of the Italian-speaking Internet community, and assess the possibilities offered by subtitling in conveying humor into a different language/culture. Three episodes were subtitled (“Pizza”, “Carrot", and “Surprise”) and for each of them questionnaires were created to investigate the effect of the subtitles on the viewer, at the level of individual lines as well as the whole episode. The current project is to be considered a pilot study towards the definition of ways to assess reception of humor in subtitling. Further steps in the project will include refining the questionnaires (questions will no longer focus on single lines/subtitles, but on pragmatic and situational features), and selecting a more limited target audience of IT-only subjects.