About

Russian Cat Translations refers to a trend on Tumblr in which pictures of cats in humorous situations are uploaded with captions written in Russian. Then, another user reblogs the photo with the Russian text translated to English, usually revealing something humorous.

Origin

The Russian source for many popular posts is Tumblr user markv5,^[1] a Russian Tumblr user who began posting mostly photos of cats in January of 2015. One of the first posts of makv5's to be popularly translated into English a picture of a cat in a watering can uploaded November 27th, 2016.^[3] On January 5th, 2017, Tumblr user alexyar^[4] provided a translation of markv5's caption, "another proof that cats are liquid." The post gained over 150,000 notes (shown below).

Spread

Several translated markv5 posts have grown into popular examples of the meme. For example, a post of theirs from August 9th, 2017^[8] has gained over 39,000 notes (shown below, left) and a post reblogged and translated on July 16th, 2017,^[9] has gained over 61,000 notes (shown below, right).

In addition to markv5, Russian Tumblr user mockwa^[5] has also been the source of many popular posts in the meme. According to Meme Documentation, ^[2] this trend picked up in May of 2017, as people began either directly translating posts or posting screenshots of them entering the text in Google Translate. These posts also began featuring other animals. Two popular posts from that time were translated by moonlandingwasfaked^[6] (shown below, left) and alonelypotatochip (shown below, right),^[7] which gained over 59,000 and 29,000 notes, respectively.

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References