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Part of
Reassessing Dubbing: Historical approaches and current trends
Edited by Irene Ranzato and Serenella Zanotti
[Benjamins Translation Library 148] 2019
► pp. 229–241

Chapter 11
English films vs Italian films

A comparative analysis via the Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue and the WordSmith Tools

The objective of this paper is to address issues of comparability between English and Italian film dialogues. A comparison is drawn between dispersed words and n-grams extracted from the original English component, from the dubbed Italian component and from the original Italian component of the Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue (Freddi and Pavesi 2009a; Pavesi et al. 2014; Zago 2018) via the WordSmith Tools software (Scott 2011). Besides identifying cross-linguistic dimensions of comparability between non-translated films, the paper examines the linguistic profile of dubbed Italian films against the background of both the language of original English films – the source texts – and the language of original Italian films. The findings suggest that film dialogue is a cross-linguistically stable register driven by the need to represent orality as well as by diegetic concerns.
Keywords: comparability, verbs, orality, diegesis, dispersion
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Dimensions of linguistic comparability between original English films and original Italian films
    • 4.2The translational perspective: Evidence from dubbed Italian films
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.148.11zag
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