Analysing Audiovisual Dialogue: Linguistic and Translational Insights

This volume is a collection of studies on the language of audiovisual − film and television − dialogue, both in original and translated texts. It hosts contributions by researchers addressing the topic from different but complementary disciplinary angles and various linguistic and socio-cultural perspectives. The volume thus testifies the growing interest for this variety of language “written to be spoken as if not written” (Gregory 1968; Taylor 1999), also described as “parlato-recitato” (Nencioni 1976) or “simulated spoken language” (Rossi 1999), a type of fictional, pre-fabricated dialogue (Marzà, Chaume this volume; Romero this volume) which − unlike narrative − is ultimately produced and received in the audio-oral medium and − unlike theatre − is irreversibly bound to a fixed, represented context. The need for systematic investigations on large samples of audiovisual dialogue has in fact begun to be specifically addressed in the last few years (e.g. Rossi 1999, Bubel 2006, Romero 2008) and has resulted in the creation of corpora of original and/or dubbed language, many of which computerized (see various contributions in Chiaro et al. 2008, Matamala 2008, Alfieri et al. 2008, Quaglio 2009). In response to the call for research on audiovisual translation (AVT) to rely on large-scale collections of data, the present volume also includes investigations on a corpus of original and dubbed film dialogue created at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of the University of Pavia within the nationally funded inter-university project Ecolingua . The corpus of English dialogues dubbed into Italian presented here reflects the current dominance of English as the major source language (SL) in AVT as well as the vigour of research in a country, Italy, where dubbing is still the most common modality of audiovisual transfer.