The research project began a few years ago at the University of Pisa and aims at studying the main features of TV and film dialogue and its translation for dubbing, the most common audiovisual translation mode in Italy. In 2013 the University of Pisa and Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma (UNINT) decided to collaborate to expand the scope of the project, by compiling a joint parallel corpus made up of the transcripts of original and dubbed dialogues of US and UK TV series and feature films, selected for the project.

The study of the original English dialogues intends to explore the main features of the prefabricated orality of audiovisual products, i.e. spoken language based on a written script or, in other words, language that is “written to be spoken”. Moreover, since the vast majority of audiovisual products in Italy are dubbed, Italian audiences are exposed to more dubbed dialogues than dialogues in original Italian; in other words, in quantitative terms the most significant models of spoken Italian are the result of a translation and adaptation process. It is very interesting to study their nature to better identify the distinguishing features of dubbese. Finally, it is worth pointing out that, although over the last fifteen years film dubbing has attracted some interest in academia, the dubbing of TV series has largely been neglected until now. Therefore, it was decided to include the language of TV series in this research project, in the light of the fact that in the last decade these products have enjoyed an increase both in available range and audience ratings.

The DubTalk project is funded by the Research Fund of Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma (UNINT) for a three-year period (2013-2015).