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.