This contribution will focus on the language of AVT, conceived as a type of translated language worth investigating in itself, and in the search for regularities at various linguistic, generic and translational levels. Although I will be speaking about dubbing, I believe that my observations could be easily applied to the language of other types of AVT such as subtitling, audio description or televised interviews.
I will start from the widely shared belief that metalinguistic introspection, insight and individual appraisal are not sufficient to gain full access to the regularities of linguistic and translational behaviour. To reach valid and reliable generalizations on dubbed language, therefore, we need to support statements based on experience or single case-studies with quantifications on large samples of dubbed texts, in line with research on other translated languages (cf. Corpus-based Translation Studies). It is only through analyses of wide collections of primary data that we can identify systematic patterns of translational outcomes, infer norms of translational behaviour and assess the role of the universals of translation in this specific transfer activity.
Although thorough profiles of the language/languages of dubbing are needed to compare with recent findings on original audiovisual languages, the investigation of individual features or clusters of related features can tell us quite a lot about the nature of dubbed language, its place in the target community’s sociolinguistic repertoire, its relationship with the source language texts and its functions in audiovidual translation. I will briefly review some of the investigations carried out on the language of dubbing, and distinguish between onomasiological and semasiological approaches depending on whether the starting point for analysis are the communicative functions performed in the fictional dialogue (e.g. speech acts) or the language structures found in film language (e.g. discourse markers, conversational routines). Following the latter procedure and relying on the Pavia Corpus of Film dialogue, I will examine the results on two clusters of features – interjections and personal pronouns – in dubbed language, with specific reference to Italian translated from English. A careful and flexible use of translated, original and reference corpora will be shown to help assess the degree of naturalness of dubbed texts, define the role of interference in AVT and highlight the interactional dimension of film dialogue.

María PAVESI Ph. D. in Linguistics from Edimburgh and Pavia, is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Pavia and visiting professor at Roehampton University, London. 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 very 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 partin 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, interferenceand translational routines", 2008). maria.pavesi@unipv.it.