Recently, translation studies have benefited from the use of corpora, both parallel and comparable, aiding the study of translation specificities and tendencies (Baker 2004) or universals such as transfer, simplification and explicitation (Laviosa 1998; Mauranen and Kuijamaki 2004), and facilitating comparative and contrastive language studies (corpus-based translation studies, CTS). AVT research, in particular, has only just started to look to corpora as a resource for the study of recurrent translation solutions, alignment and disalignment with target language norms, e.g., in film dubbing, (Pavesi 2005, 2008, 2009; Romero-Fresco 2006, 2009; Bruti and Pavesi 2008; Valentini 2008; Heiss and Soffritti 2008), translators variability (Freddi 2009) and creativity.
The proposed paper discusses some results from a state-of-the-art research project which has been carried out at the University of Pavia to compile an annotated parallel corpus of both American and British films released in the period between 1995 and 2005 and their Italian dubbed versions in order to study features of dubbed language. The Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue (Freddi and Pavesi 2009) consists of the orthographic and prosodic transcriptions of films all characterised by face-to-face conversation in daily contexts and, as a guarantee of their status and diffusion within the cultures that produced and consumed them, successful both with the critics and the general public.
The dialogues so transcribed, and with the original and the translation aligned, are related to the contextual information that has been encoded in the corpus thanks to a database structure thought out to facilitate observation of continuity patterns that cut across individual variation as well as idiosyncrasies and individual behaviour in the linguistic mediation process. Findings from the Pavia Corpus are chronologically updated through data collected in the years following 2005 to see if the same trends are observable and why.
Such empirical approach takes up the suggestion for context-sensitive analyses of translations coming from different directions from within CTS, especially Baker 2004, but also AVT, particularly Díaz-Cintas 2004. It is argued that quantitative information resulting from observation of recurrent translators’ behaviour can help pinpoint linguistic and translational areas that are problematic, improve translation quality, develop translators’ awareness and thus foster alignment with acceptability standards.

Maria FREDDI is tenured Researcher in English language and linguistics at the University of Pavia, where she currently teaches courses in English grammar, text and corpus linguistics. She has a PhD from the Catholic University, Milan on the rhetoric of science. Her research interests include corpus linguistics also applied to the study of translation, English for Specific and Academic Purposes, in particular the discourse of science and technology, areas in which she has published research articles and contributed to national and international conferences. She is the author of the book Functional Grammar: An introduction for the EFL student, Bologna, 2006.