Maria Freddi

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

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.

Developments and trends in the Rhetoric of Science

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A phraseological approach to film dialogue: Film stylistics revisited

The paper takes film dialogue as a test case for a corpus-driven investigation of phraseology. The analysis is mainly based on three strands of research, both linguistic and translational. These are: corpus work comparing contemporary film and television dialogue with natural conversation, research on translational routines in audiovisual translation (dubbese) and the phraseological approach to language. However, in order to focus on the formulaic features of English original film dialogue, the translational perspective is backgrounded. The study is corpus-driven in that formulae of filmic speech are extracted from the corpus on the basis of their frequency. Furthermore, the sequences thus found are compared to general reference corpora of British and American English in order to explore their distribution and functions. The results are shown to be relevant to a stylistic appraisal of scripted film dialogue as well as to an understanding of some methodological issues associated with corpus-driven studies of phraseology in general.

Rhetoric of science: fixed and changing modes of scientific discourse

Contesting the opposition between (scientific) ‘demonstration’ and (rhetorical) ‘argumentation,’ the author claims that argumentation is a full-blown, legitimate way of knowledge acquisition and knowledge-based decision making. The form and substance of argumentative dialogue is presented as a powerful intellectual tool that can build a bridge between the ‘two academic cultures.’