The present paper sets out to illustrate a possible application of corpus-based methods to the field of AVT drawing on the experience of Forlixt 1, the Forlì Corpus of Screen Translation. Particularly, the present study will aim at showing how the exploitation of a multimedia, annotated, reciprocal corpus can help cast a new light not only on the analysis of translation strategies, but also on the way original film dialogues are built as far as narrative aims, plot structuring, message conveyance, and, ultimately, genres’ conventions, are concerned.
First we will exemplify the extent to which the annotation of some pragmatic phenomena (i.e. communicative acts and situations) can help contrastively point out patterns of recurrent translational behaviour in a corpus of Italian dubbed products from French. Next we will attempt at explaining such results against other significant linguistic features or specific semiotic constraints identified. In so doing, we will show how it is possible to elicit well-founded quantitative results together with significant context-dependant qualitative solutions by applying a corpus-based approach to AVT.
Second we will illustrate how the frequency and distribution of such categories in the original corpus can also usefully help emphasize some intrinsic features of cinematic and television’s dialogues, in terms of communicative verisimilitude, observance of genre-related conventions, and explicitness of film discourse. Such results may eventually provide the case for reviewing the traditional approach to the investigation of dubbed language, which may be less influenced from the translation process than from inherent features of original screenplay writing.