The Global Format Trade: A Contrastive analysis of the U.S. sitcom Married… with children and its Bulgarian remake

Abstract

The following study analyzes the popular U.S. sitcom Married… with children (1987 – 1997) by comparing it to its Bulgarian remake (2012). Drawing on a previous analysis (Beeden & de Bruin, 2010), which stressed the importance of cultural proximity between the new production and the target audience, this investigation aims to establish the strategies available for generating different layers of proximity. Accordingly, the main question behind this contrastive analysis was: what strategies were employed in the Bulgarian adaptation of the U.S. sitcom Married... with Children to achieve proximity? The analysis, based on a two-episode corpus, identified three distinct strategies of proximity creation. First of all, adding, altering or omitting extralinguistic cultural references (ECRs) results in the generation or modification of proximity layers. This strategy was most frequently used as in the form of adding or changing celebrity or institutional names. Secondly, proximity is also induced by adjusting non-verbal language. Lastly, proximity was brought about by emphasizing manners and values.