Greetings, leave-takings and good wishes are usually regarded as variously ‘complex’ expressions because of the array of socio-pragmatic meanings that are associated with them (see Laver 1981, Eisenstein-Ebsworth et al. 1996, Masi 2008). The importance of such expressions and the consequences of their complexities for translation have also been touched upon in the relevant literature (Ferguson 1981; Eisenstein-Ebsworth et al. 1996; also see Schauera & Adolphsb 2005). The present work builds on the premises of previous research (Bonsignori, Bruti & Masi forthcoming) and intends to describe translating trends for greetings and leave-takings in film language and in translation and to verify whether they are ‘keys to orality’ in dubbed Italian.
This is done by enlarging an existing corpus of nine recently marketed films with a new sample consisting of six more films, where language varies diatopically, diachronically and diastratically. A pilot reference corpus containing three original Italian films will also be expanded with another three films and will be exploited to investigate the phenomena under investigation in the original, that is, not translated, Italian film dialogue.
Past research has indeed revealed interesting findings and aspects that deserve further investigation for corroboration. Greetings and leave-takings are granted much space both in English film language and dubbed Italian and they are keys to orality in dubbing, hence the importance of a congruent mapping. Relevant issues in translating trends especially concern the asymmetry of ‘good forms’, the coherence of register across turns and between characters, along with peculiar choices pertaining to idiolect and connoted slang varieties. Leave-takings, in particular, include ‘formulae’ with different degrees of ‘fixity’ as well as a vast range of expressions of phatic communion, which are thus in need of finer-grained categorisation. Also, the varying categories of expressions will be further analysed in relation to the issue of ‘translation routines’, whose uncertain status between translationese and real Italian will be checked against the greater quantity of data on Italian, especially with regard to the spontaneous spoken register we propose in the present contribution.

References
Bonsignori V., Bruti S., Masi S. forthcoming, “Formulae across languages: English greetings, leave-takings and good wishes in dubbed Italian”, in J.-M. Lavaur and A. Serban (eds), Multidisciplinary Approaches to Audiovisual Translation. Papers from the International Conference on Audiovisual Translation, Montpellier, 20-22 June 2008.>Eisenstein-Ebsworth et al. 1996.
Ferguson C.A., 1981, "The structure and use of politeness formulas", in F. Coulmas (ed), Conversational Routine. Explorations in standardized communication situations and prepatterned speech, The Hague/Paris/New York, Mouton, pp. 21-35.
Laver J., 1981, "Linguistic routines and politeness in greeting and parting", In F. Coulmas (ed.), Conversational Routine. Explorations in standardized communication situations and prepatterned speech, The Hague/Paris/New York, Mouton, pp. 289-304.
Masi S., 2008,"Verbal greetings and leave-taking formulae across time and situational settings", in M. Gotti and S. Kermas (eds), Socially-conditioned Language Change: Diachronic and Synchronic Insights, Lecce, Edizioni del Grifo.
Schauera G. A., Adolphsb S., 2005, “Expressions of gratitude in corpus and DCT data: Vocabulary, formulaic sequences, and pedagogy”, System, 34, 1, pp. 119-134.

Veronica BONSIGNORI has a PhD in English Linguistics and works at the Department of English Studies at the University of Pisa (Italy), where she graduated in 2003. She is a professor of English Linguistics at the University of Pisa. Her areas of interest in research are pragmatics, especially spoken English and tag questions (the subject of her doctoral dissertation), as well as sociolinguistics (e.g., varieties of English). More recently she has been focusing on dubbing (English/Italian).