Formulaicity in and across film dialogue: clefts as translational routines

Formulaicity, an inherent feature of language, may typify film discourse. Imitation of conversation is posited to extend to conversational routines in original fictive orality, whereas the language of dubbing is believed to increase its formulaicity through translational routines, reiterated translation solutions generating recurrent strings in the target texts. Despite the role assigned to formulaicity, few corpus-based investigations have set out to account for the types, frequency and functions of formulas in both original and dubbed audiovisual dialogue. By drawing on the Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue - unidirectional English-Italian parallel corpus totalling about 500,000 words-this study analyses a special kind of formulas, English demonstrative clefts, and their formulaic translations. It evaluates how closely film language reproduces these frequent features of conversational formulaicity, and to what extent source-based patterns are resorted to in dubbing. The results show that demonstrative clefts of the type That's what I see are frequent in Anglophone film language, where they contribute to the naturalness of the register. In the Italian translations, English demonstrative clefts give way to recurring solutions that are calqued on the original triggers, exhibit a degree of fixedness in the target language and contribute to the specificity of dubbed Italian.