Constructing a corpus of translated films: a corpus view of dubbing

Abstract

Corpus linguistic research has in recent years entered the realm of Translation Studies by providing translation scholars and professionals alike with new insights into the processes and products of translation. Audiovisual translation is no exception, with corpus research being done on the linguistic and translational features of dubbing, as well as other modes of AVT, for example subtitling and audio description. The present paper explains the principles informing the design of the latest release of the Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue, a parallel corpus of American and British film dialogues and their dubbed versions into Italian to which a comparable component of original Italian films has been added, with a view to discussing the main issues concerning the use of corpora in AVT. Bringing together some of the tenets of corpus linguistics, i.e. language patterning, routine and creativity, and AVT perspectives, insights gained from the Pavia Corpus are presented as evidence for a combined approach.

Keywords:

• audiovisual translation
• Corpus-based Translation Studies
• Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue
• dubbing
• dubbing language

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the Alma Mater Ticinensis Foundation under whose auspices this research has been carried out. The title of the international research project funded is ‘English and Italian Audiovisual Language: Translation and Language Learning’.

Notes on contributor

Maria Freddi is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the Humanities Department of the University of Pavia, where she currently teaches courses in English Language (grammar and text; English for Academic Purposes) and Linguistics (corpus linguistics). In 2011 she was appointed Director of the Language Centre of the same university. Her research activity has focused on corpus linguistics (which she studied at the University of Birmingham) also applied to the study of translation, English for Specific and Academic Purposes, in particular the discourse of science and technology, and descriptive grammar, 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, Clueb, 2006. Recently, she has promoted a higher-level course for young researchers on ‘Statistical Applications for the Human Sciences’ which brings together her interest in research methodology and the study of language.

Notes

1. At the time of writing, an interesting piece was released in the electronic journal aSinc (Rivista in rete in italiano e in inglese di critica del doppiaggio, available at www.asinc.it) arguing that, even in Italy, dubbing might eventually be taken over by subtitling, given the unexpected box office success obtained by the subtitled screening of Tarantino's Django Unchained in a well-known picture house in Rome, where the dubbed version was being screened at the same time. Although the news is provocative in tone, it might point to the social changes that will, if ever, accompany the transition from dubbing to subtitling in Italy.

2. See the introductory remarks by Maria Pavesi at the international conference The Languages of Films: Dubbing, Acquisition and Methodology, held in Pavia on 14–15 September 2012.

3. The spoken component of the British National Corpus, http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/, and the LIP corpus of spoken Italian.

4. The technology used is the relational database. For a detailed description of the data model, see Freddi and Lunghi (in press). It should also be noted that for reasons of copyright clearance, the PCFD does not currently include the audio or visual streams.

5. Methodological difficulties like genre comparability have been stressed by Kenning (2010, p. 489–490) and by Baker (2004, p. 171), who argues that ‘fiction is too broad a category to ensure a reliable basis for comparison’.