Conversation as a unit of film analysis. Databases of L3 translation and audiovisual samples of multilingualism

This chapter argues in favour of analysing audiovisual texts (cinema and TV) by using the concept and unit of “conversation”, theoretically (Bakhtin 1982; Grice 1975; Sidnell 2010) and practically, for the purpose of creating an audiovisual corpus or database. The point is illustrated and defended from the experience of research carried out within the Trafilm project (trafilm.net), whose aim is to create a database of instances of multilingualism in films and samples of how they are rendered in dubbing, subtitling (including SDH) and audio description, mostly (but not exclusively, because it is open to researchers with other interests) from English into Spanish. Conversations are seen as the smallest possible units that contain instances of L3 (any language which is not the main language) with sufficient contextual and pragmatic information, and possibly useful for analysing other audiovisual (AV) features (e.g., representation of identities), too, and not only L3.