Translating Morphological Hapax Legomena: A Corpus-Assisted Study of Filmic Teen Speech

This study explores the strategies used by professionals to translate language creativity in dubbed movies, with a focus on new words formed via morphological processes. As a case study, movies targeted at teenagers were selected, as language creativity is the quintessence of teenagers’ identities. For this purpose, a parallel corpus of American movies and their Italian dubbed versions was compiled (TFC, Teen Film Corpus). The analysis consists in a combined approach of qualitative and quantitative investigation, i.e. the manual analysis of the corpus was integrated with the use of the software programs Sketch Engine (www.sketchengine.co.uk) and WMatrix (http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/). Translation strategies were examined with a dual focus: a formal perspective and a socio-cultural perspective. The formal perspective focused on the linguistic strategies used in Italian to reproduce the same creative effects as in the original versions. The socio-cultural perspective focused on sensitive topics encoded in creative words, whose translation can affect the way youth culture is represented (e.g., references to sex, violence and drug consumption). This theoretical analysis was integrated with a viewer perception test, i.e., a survey administered to a sample of viewers to elicit their reactions to the translation solutions used in the movies. The use of a perception test implies that the analysis of language creativity is not limited to the author’s intuitions, but it is also based on empirical data provided by the actual end-users of the movies

Compliment Patterning among Young Speakers: A Diachronic and Translational Study of English and Dubbed Italian Film Dialogue

The construction and translation of socio-pragmatic meanings in film speech poses intriguing challenges due to the complex semiotic nature of audiovisual texts. This exploratory case study presents the results of an analysis that aimed to detect and discuss the use of compliments by teenagers in English and dubbed Italian film dialogue as represented in two cult teen movies released in different decades. The results indicate that compliments tend to occur quite frequently both as creative and formulaic structures. Moreover, the formulaic patterns themselves acquire creative features due to the presence of informal and trendy expressions. Hypotheses are made about the motivations behind different distributional patterns between the two movies, thus indicating potential diachronic variations. Translation strategies are also surveyed, and both cases of creativity and dubious solutions are highlighted

Compliment Patterning among Young Speakers: A Diachronic and Translational Study of English and Dubbed Italian Film Dialogue

The construction and translation of socio-pragmatic meanings in film speech poses intriguing challenges due to the complex semiotic nature of audiovisual texts. This exploratory case study presents the results of an analysis that aimed to detect and discuss the use of compliments by teenagers in English and dubbed Italian film dialogue as represented in two cult teen movies released in different decades. The results indicate that compliments tend to occur quite frequently both as creative and formulaic structures. Moreover, the formulaic patterns themselves acquire creative features due to the presence of informal and trendy expressions. Hypotheses are made about the motivations behind different distributional patterns between the two movies, thus indicating potential diachronic variations. Translation strategies are also surveyed, and both cases of creativity and dubious solutions are highlighted

A New Development in Audiovisual Translation Studies: Focus on Target Audience Perception

Audiovisual translation is now a well-established sub-discipline of Translation Studies (TS): a position that it has reached over the last twenty years or so. Italian scholars and professionals in the field have made a substantial contribution to this successful development, a brief overview of which will be given in the first part of this article, inevitably concentrating on dubbing in the Italian context. Special attention will be devoted to the question of target audience perception, an area where researchers in the University of Bologna at Forlì have excelled. The second part of the article applies the methodology followed by the above mentioned researchers in a case study of how Italian end users perceive the dubbed version of the British film The History Boys (2006), which contains a plethora of culture-specific verbal and visual references to the English education system. The aim of the study was to ascertain: a) whether translation/adaptation allows the transmission in this admittedly constrained medium of all the intended culture-bound issues, only too well known to the source audience, and, if so, to what extent, and b) whether the target audience respondents to the e-questionnaire used were aware that they were missing information. The linked, albeit controversial, issue of quality assessment will also be addressed

“A Language of One’s Own”: Idiolect, Creativity and Style.

Introduzione terminologica e teorica ai contributi del volume