Social deixis constitutes a major area of contrast between languages and can affect translation thus becoming an index of mediated as opposed to non-mediated language. Film translation in particular provides a challenging context for the use of forms of address as audiovisual dialogue is supposed to imitate spontaneous behaviour whilst at the same time advancing narration and offering a condensed representation of individual and social identities.
Starting from the 1960s seminal works on address and politeness, several studies have shown that languages vary widely in the use of address strategies both interlinguistically, depending on the lexical or morphological strategies available (e.g., Helmbrecht 2003), and intralinguistically, depending on different communities and networks (e.g., Clyne et al. 2009). English and Italian contrast markedly in this respect (e.g., Murray 2002, Renzi 1995, Mazzoleni 1995), with the Tu-Lei system in Italian forcibly making explicit what in English is often left implicit or undefined. Italian dubbing translations thus benefit from an additional dimension in the definition of characters and their relationships (Pavesi 1996, see Horton 1999).
With reference to a selection of contemporary American and British films dubbed into Italian, this paper will focus on the specific issue of shifts in Italian address pronouns. It will show that, far from just deriving from linguistic features of the source text or conventions of the target community, these address strategies in translated texts may be motivated by attitudinal and diegetic changes expressed contextually and paralinguistically in the original audiovisual texts. In this way pronominal shifts can be appropriately regarded as instances of intersemiotic translation.
Pronoun shifts will thus be shown to linguistically code a change in characters’ relationships, anticipate or amplify the emotional intensity of key narrative moments, but also result from dubbing translators’ creative interpretation of the developing action and interpersonal dynamics.

References
Clyne, M. , Norrby C. , Warren J. (2009), Language and Human Relations. Styles of Address in Contemporary Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Helmbrecht J. (2003), Politeness distinctions in personal pronouns. In F. Lenz (ed.) Deictic conceptualization of space, time and person. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 185-203.
Horton, D. (1999), Social deixis in the translation of dramatic discourse. Babel, 45, 53-73.
Mazzoleni M. (1995), Il vocativo, in L. Renzi, G. Salvi, A. Cardinaletti (eds.). 377-402.
Pavesi, M. (1996), L’allocuzione nel doppiaggio dall’inglese all’italiano. In C. Heiss, R.M. Bollettieri Bosinelli (eds.) Traduzione multimediale per il cinema, la televisione e la scena. Bologna: CLUEB, 117-130.
Renzi L. (1995), La deissi personale e il suo uso sociale, in L. Renzi, G. Salvi, A. Cardinaletti (eds.), 350-375.

Maria PAVESI has PhD in Linguistics from Edinburgh (Scotland) and Pavia (Italy) and is professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Pavia and visiting professor at the University of Roehampton (UK). Her research has addressed several topics in English applied linguistics and has focused on second language acquisition, the English of science, corpus linguistics and film translation. Maria Pavesi has published widely in these areas both nationally and internationally and she is the author of La traduzione filmica: Aspetti del parlato doppiato dall'inglese all'italiano, Roma, 2005. Maria Pavesi has taken part in various national and international projects and was the co-organiser of “Cinema Paradiso: I sottotitoli nell'apprendimento linguistico”, a project on film subtitling in language learning co-financed by the EU in the European year of languages. Maria Pavesi was also one of the coordinators of a national project on corpora, audiovisual translation and second language learning. She is currently working on features of spoken language in film dubbing from English into Italian (“Spoken language in film dubbing: Target language norms, interference and translational routines”, 2008).